There will always be enough bread and circus. They're #1 and #2 necessary things to always give people to keep them silent on a couch rather than protesting or worse.
That's the thing though: it's not so easy to just feed a continent's worth of people. As a ruler, if you keep running around like the elephant in a china shop, breaking critical infrastructure left and right in the name of "efficiency", you may discover that, come next season, there just isn't any bread to give, and there's fuck all you can do at that point.
An Italian plumber had a solution
He had a brother though and he likes powerups too.