A Boring Dystopia

TBH: You shoudn't base such broad historical theories on 7 lines of Reddit comments without sources. There is a broad literature about the fall of the roman empire and its causes and a lot of research into the british empire and also capitalism, so maybe read a few books on the topic before jumping to such far fetched conclusions?

The Roman Empire predates capitalism so I wouldn't read too much into how their economy operated.

The description is a vast oversimplification of the fall of the Roman Empire, of course.

Like the game Monopoly, unrestrained capitalism will always end up with a few people owning almost all the value while everyone else live in poverty, and it will always end up in systemic collapse because you can’t get infinite value out of finite resources. At some point the game will be over.

But unrestrained capitalism doesn’t exist, even in today’s very unequal world. There are forces that undo the momentum of capitalism, including taxation, regulation, trade barriers, and public goods and services. Some countries do this better than others.

I happen to think that regulated capitalism, balanced by a heavy emphasis of wealth taxation and investment in public goods and services, is better than any other system that relies on non-monetary control of resources. It can be sustainable, but not in its current state.