Glenn Reynolds: Don't let U.S. become next Rome … Entrenched political elites will sacrifice anything to retain power, including their own country…. As you vote, remember that the more resources you put under the control of the political class, the more likely it is that things will eventually go bad. Politicians seldom look past the next election, and they're willing to sacrifice pretty much anything to hang on. And that "pretty much anything" includes you. –USA Today

Glenn Reynolds is law professor and member of the USA Today editorial board. He makes good points in this just-published editorial, as you can see above.

But the reality goes far deeper than that.

The main idea Reynolds presents is that the more control voters give politicians, the more resources they have at hand to abuse.

In other words, politicians will invariably use the power they have to enrich themselves and their cronies at your expense.

More:

I happened to be reading … Joseph A. Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies¨ Tainter's theory, to simplify things quite a bit, is that as societies grow they become more complex, slapping on layer after layer of institutions, regulations and customs to deal with challenges (and, I suspect, to facilitate the ruling classes' extracting resources from the ruled).

… Eventually, the society is devoting almost all its resources to maintaining these institutions and has very little reserve left to deal with the unexpected. The result is that challenges that it would have weathered easily in the past are now sufficient to bring it to an end.

But Reynolds never discusses modern, monopoly central banking. The entire US economy – the world's economy – is poisoned by it.

Inevitably monopolies self-destruct, often destroying everything they have touched. Since the dollar is the world's reserve currency, it is the dollar that is the most destructive to the global economy.

Also, Reynolds makes the point that the US needs to avoid becoming the "next Rome." With thousands of military bases around the world and a currency that dominates world trade, it is too late for that.

The US sociopolitical and economic environment does not need to anticipate Rome and Roman disasters. It has traveled far beyond Rome and simply awaits its coup de grace.

Despite Reynolds's apparent optimism, redefining what kind of politicians ought to be elected will do little or  nothing to restore US solvency.

This is a country with $200 trillion in total, nominal debt and bank involvement in a derivatives market said to total $1,000 trillion.

The entire US financial system rests on a foundation of monopoly debt currency.