Welcome to Citizen. We've got a special show today.

We're talking about investing in Americans.

Something that I think that our country fails to do, while we often succeed in investing in

people who are shiftless layabouts and illegal immigrants.

And of course, we allow our country to be plundered by assholes and politics and corporate life.

But the sad reality is, despite these people's greed or laziness,

should we invest in Americans, there would be a positive return for everybody.

History certainly bears this out, and we're going to talk a little bit about that today.

There are rare moments in history when a civilization drops the mask and speaks plainly about its own condition.

Not the version it teaches its children and tidy, well put together textbooks, not the swelling anthem.

It plays to stir young men towards battle,

not the gleaming marble myth, chiseled into monuments and lit at dusk for tourists and patriots alike. But the actual unvarnished truth. One of those moments comes from a Greek historian

reflecting on Rome at a critical hour and its life.

The sentence is not dramatic, it's not poetic in the romantic sense, but it is clinical, almost surgical in its clarity.

He writes,

Then the poor deprived of their land were no longer eager for military service and had few

children so that soon all Italy was bereft of free men and filled with gangs of foreign slaves

through whom the rich cultivated their estates, having driven away the free citizens.

The historian was Plutarch,

the statesman whose warning he preserved

was Tiberius Gracchus.

This is not merely an episode in Roman political history,

...