|
A smattering of today's mainstream
pundits is beginning to understand that what economically plagues us today is
something quite different from the standard inflationary-recessionary cycles
that have prevailed since World War II. But the great majority of talking
heads and financial columnists remain clueless -- dutifully accepting the
establishment line that depicts the nature of recessions from past models.
The error in this view is that all recessions since World War II have been
the result of Fed credit tightening and naturally were quick to respond to
credit loosening. But this time around our malaise is not caused by Fed
engineered high interest rates. It is far deeper and more systemic. It stems
from the great Keynesian theoretical flaw that will always manifest in the
long run: central bank credit expansion leads to "debt
saturation" and "malinvestment,"
which reverses the boom that the credit expansion was meant to perpetuate,
but does not do so until the latter stages of the Kondratieff cycle.
This is because central bank
credit expansion brings about healthy growth like cocaine brings about well
being. In the early stages of the Kondratieff cycle, businesses flourish, but
once an economy becomes "debt saturated," borrowing drops off
drastically, which causes the rate of money supply growth to decline by
negating the central bank's multiplier effect. This brings disinflationary
pressures, which then lead to actual deflation. In addition, Keynesian
credit expansion also creates widespread "malinvestment,"
i.e., capital expenditures for which there is no genuine demand and which
cannot be sustained once disinflationary pressures set in.
Thus, what is different this time
is that large loads of debt and malinvestment have
built up in the economy. They must now be worked off (i.e., liquidated) before
demand and growth can be restored, which will require many years and
considerable hardship.
As the renowned economist Ludwig
von Mises warned us decades ago: "There is no
means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit
expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as
the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later
as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved." [Human
Action, Regnery, 1966, p. 572.]
Despite this irreparable Keynesian
flaw, our statist planners continue to believe that the Federal Reserve will
be able to wave its magic "liquidity wand" and rescue us as it
always has. We are governed by obtuse bureaucrats guided by neo-fascistic
academics. Is it any wonder that dogma is being used to confront problems
that require acumen? Those mired in "paint by the numbers" policy
approaches are always historically blindsided. Such a destructive hit now
awaits us.
"Something ugly this way
comes," writes brash and brainy Jim Willie in his Ass-Backwards Economics series. But the bovines in our
establishment pasture are not cerebrally independent enough to grasp the
horrific financial collapse of which he speaks. Lacking the contrarian
attitude necessary to see truth coming down the pike, they drone out Pollyannish bunkum about the economy that pacifies the
herd and reinforces the dogma to which they subscribe. What they should be
stocking up for, however, is the devastating "mother of all bear
markets" that is now beginning its attack upon our lives in the manner
that bubonic plague begins its contagion by first striking isolated victims,
then later explosively metastasizing throughout the whole of society with pervasive
death and ruin.
This has become our fate because
our pundits cannot see the big picture and how ideology drives the engine of
life. Human civilization is structured in rising and falling waves --
economic, political, technological, sociological, religious, artistic, etc.
These waves all interact to make up an existential pattern that we call
history. Most times these historical waves, while socially disruptive, are
not catastrophic. They bring about steady progress in society through the
phenomenon that Joseph Schumpeter dubbed "creative destruction" in
his prophetic treatise, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. But every
so often in history, there comes a time when one or more of the waves become
TIDAL in scope and effect. They become catastrophic. This takes place when
the ideological freight train of society gets thrown off the tracks into
gargantuan fallacies at the fundamental philosophical level, which then
causes prominent pundits and thinkers to drag their nations into disastrous
policies.
Our ideological freight train got
thrown off the tracks at this fundamental philosophical level 90 years ago
with the advent of World War I and the end of the classical free-market age
that our Founding Fathers and Adam Smith had initiated. Marxism and moral
relativism descended upon us to unleash the hounds of hell. They destroyed
the idea of natural law and its manifestation in a constitutionally limited
government -- the combine that had sustained free civilization since the days
of Magna Carta 700 years prior. Law became whatever
government (and its 51% herd) said it was. This began the demise of the
American system -- this rejection of a natural law transcending government
that is discovered by reason, and acts as the overseer of the positive
law that is formed by government and its majority will.
Once unhinged from the higher
natural law, the positive law of our legislatures and our courts became like
paper money unhinged from gold. It could now go wherever it wished, and that
is what it proceeded to do. As a result, legislative law and judicial decree
are being used by the collectivists to mandate outrageous dictates and
usurpations of rights to swell government into a devouring monster. This
monster now treats its citizens like manipulable
X's and O's on a graph to create what its henchmen tell us will be a
"great planned society," but in reality is nothing but a gross game
of privilege and power lust on the part of a neo-fascist ruling elite of
bureaucrats, bankers, corporate moguls, and academics.
Since there is a delay between the
onset of ideological fallacy among a society's intellectuals and its
manifestation in the everyday life of the society, it is difficult to
perceive the connection that our troubles today have to the fallacious
ideological venom unleashed decades prior. But the connection is there even
though the venom takes many years to filter out among the people in the form
of ruinous policy.
The poisonous ideas that resulted
from the philosophical train wreck of the 1900-1920 era have been seeping
into our culture ever since to create a whole series of destructive
historical waves. The first of these destructive waves was the Great
Depression and its resultant Keynesian-New Deal revolution. Following
thereafter were others such as the "new-left hippie revolution" in
the sixties, the "compulsive consumerism" of the eighties, and the
hallucinatory "new economy/market bubble" of the nineties that
Greenspan, Clinton, and Rubin bestowed upon us. But because the ideological
train wreck was so momentous 90 years ago, we are now entering a TIDAL era of
history in which the waves will become epochal and apocalyptic.
That is to say, they will end our
world as we know it.
As a result of the philosophical
train wreck and the waves it set in motion, numerous dangerous factors now
prevail in America that are driving us and the rest of the world toward a
political-economic maelstrom. These factors have entrenched themselves over
the decades because of our greed and shortsightedness
as a people. There are four of these factors that transcend in importance all
the others and now act as a guarantee of catastrophic times to come. They are
what I call the "New Horsemen of the Apocalypse." They are, like
their biblical namesakes, precursors to disaster.
What follows are thumbnail
sketches of these new apocalyptic horsemen that threaten our society today.
They are grimly portentous realities that our establishment pundits are
either misinterpreting, or ignoring, or simply cannot grasp in their
severity. But these four hideous horsemen are wreaking havoc in our society.
And they will not go away; so we must confront them. How we choose to cope
with them in the upcoming years will determine what manner of society we will
construct in the aftermath of the worldwide breakdown toward which they are
propelling us. The Four New Horsemen of the Apocalypse are: 1) Keynesian
monetary policy, 2) Demopublican political control,
3) the Pax Americana mindset,
and 4) the Kondratieff Cycle. To understand more clearly the dangers involved,
let's examine each of them.
Horseman 1: Keynesian Monetary Policy
The Keynesian paradigm was
presented to the world in 1936 as the salvation to "mature"
capitalism's alleged inability to produce sufficient demand to bring about
productivity. In actuality, however, it was one of the components of Karl
Marx's dual strategy for world revolution: Debase the language and the money,
and capitalism will fall like a ripe plum. Keynesian economics is nothing
but academic humbuggery to justify a sophisticated counterfeiting scheme in
order to debase a nation's currency so as to circumvent the laws of nature
and get something for nothing (the goal of all collectivist tyrannies since
the dawn of civilization). It has brought about massive amounts of paper dollars
that work their way into the world's myriad market interactions to wreak
havoc like computer viruses worming their way into the world's myriad
computers. The Keynesian paradigm has helped to bring about the tyrannical
overreach of our Federal Government, it has brought us our present fiscal
deficit of $450 billion, and it has given us annual trade deficits that now
exceed $500 billion, and show no signs of lessening.
Keynesian policy has created the
terribly warped "U.S. centric" globalized trading system that
dominates us today. Dollar hegemony rules the world and forces all nations
into dependency upon exporting to the giant American Consumption Machine,
which itself is grotesquely dependent upon the oligarchic group of FOMC
bureaucrats in Washington spewing out ever increasing amounts of paper
dollars to "stimulate aggregate demand" at a rate unparalleled in
history. This has brought about immense imbalances in international trade and
currencies, which feed back on themselves to expand the problems with each
new round of "liquidity injections" from the Fed. (For an
introduction to Keynesian irrationality, see my article "Contrarians and the Keynesian Myth.")
To try and counter the
deteriorating conditions with which the Keynesian paradigm has plagued us,
our government is now reduced to exhorting the American people to cash in
their savings (via mortgage refinancing) to shop till they drop. This is the
horrendous and pitiful legacy of J. M. Keynes. We are now to consume our
vital seed corn in a last ditch effort to try and keep our moribund economy
afloat through blind, doltish "consumer spending."
From the Keynesian paradigm has also come our economy's massive jobs hemorrhaging to foreign countries. Fiat money inflation
coupled with Keynesian consumption dogma has driven Americans to consume more
than they wish to produce (which is what unlimited credit and "printing
press wealth" do to people's desires). This has created our enormous trade
deficit, which has produced the worldwide glut of dollars flowing to third
world countries and the Asian tigers. This glut of dollars has led these
nations to ratchet up their manufacturing productivity and join in the
"export to America mania" as their way to wealth. After all, if the
Fed is going to wallpaper the world with trillions of newly printed dollars
via international trade, then those nations with cheap labor
will naturally use those dollars to produce cheaper goods to export back to
America and her Keynesian consumption gluttons. Thus, because the explosions
of credit and paper dollars from our Fed are used by American consumers to
purchase foreign goods from cheap-labor third world
countries, it takes business away from high-cost American manufacturing. In a
desperate effort to lower costs and survive, American industry is then
compelled to shift large parts of their manufacturing capacity to the cheap-labor nations. Voila!
The giant sucking sound of jobs
going overseas is heard relentlessly in our land, and will continue to be
heard as long as the Fed stays in the monetary wallpaper business.
There are other factors also that
contribute to our chronic uncompetitiveness and
resultant jobs hemorrhaging. For example: 1)
Monopolistic labor union control in the U.S. and
its escalation of wages drives our manufacturers offshore in order to reduce labor costs. 2) Our government refuses to mandate
reciprocity of product entry with trading partners, thus allowing foreign
governments to close their markets to our goods while still selling their
goods in America. And 3) Demopublican
interventionists in Congress over the past 50 years have built a stupendous
crazy quilt of regulations that drives up the cost of our goods and makes
many of them uncompetitive.
All these economic problems,
though, go back to Keynes and the Marxian induced philosophical train wreck
90 years ago. Keynes' dream to overthrow the classical order of Adam Smith
was greatly influenced by Marx's poison. And Marx's poison was created by his
gross misunderstanding of capitalism. Marx was a warped genius who let his
hatreds dictate his premises, and consequently he erected a giant spider web
of fallacies that lesser intellects adopted and sold to the world. Keynes was
one of those lesser intellects. He began his career immersed in Fabian socialism in turn-of-the-century England. To the Fabian intellectuals, capitalism was the great evil of
existence, and Marxism was the great savior, which
they felt had to be brought about gradually rather than violently as Lenin
was doing in Russia. Keynes' monetary paradigm fit the Fabians perfectly, and
they in turn fit with his desires to insidiously overturn the classical
free-market order via monetary debasement and progressive taxation.
Without Keynesian inflation of
paper dollars and the Federal Government's consumption driven fiscal policy,
our trade and currency imbalances, along with our pyramiding debt and
offshore jobs transfer, would never have come into being. We would still be a
creditor nation that consumes only what we produce. We would still have a
manufacturing base that is capable of employing a growing number of workers.
We would still have a genuine currency based upon gold. We would not be
trying to TAKE from life by financial chicanery. Instead we would first be
GIVING to life by free-enterprise production, then consuming proportionally
in return.
Marx's influence on Keynes (as
with almost all intellectuals of that era) was immense. Keynes played
Rosemary's baby to Marx's philosophical Scratch. Prior to Keynes, socialism
and its wealth redistribution had found scant enthusiasm in America. But
Keynes smoothed over the harsh Marxist anti-individualism with artful
sophistry and clever rhetoric into something salable
to Americans. He created an academic shroud of respectability for the crude
thievery of inflation. When the crisis of the Depression hit, he was waiting
in the wings to whisper his enticements into the ears of a frightened and now
receptive people who wanted to believe that the rampant statism
he and Roosevelt were promoting would somehow be compatible with the freedom
and sound money upon which America had been built. It was not to be, however.
Keynes was one of history's greatest charlatans. His monetary paradigm was
not compatible with individual freedom and limited government. And it did not
cure the Depression; it cursed us with one of the apocalyptic horsemen now
riding down upon us.
Horseman 2: Demopublican
Political Control
One of the most popular ideas
taught in American civics classes is that the strength of the American
political system lies in the fact that we have a two-party political
process. This, I maintain, is akin to teaching that babies come from
storks. It's a fairy tale we spin out to avoid messy details of reality we
prefer not to face. The reality is that the Democratic and Republican
parties, as distinctive parties, are shams. They have become nothing
but two divisions of the Central Leviathan Party. This has been our political
reality ever since Dwight Eisenhower defeated the "old guard"
individualist Republicans under Robert Taft in 1952 and made the Republicans
into a big government welfare-state party like the New Deal Democrats of
Roosevelt and Truman. From that year on, there has been no voice in the world
of politics for the original Founders' vision. The last vestiges of limited,
decentralized government died with Eisenhower's capitulation to Keynes and
the New Deal.
In the ensuing decades, the
collectivists have skillfully established a deceptive
ONE-PARTY dictatorial system, which their media lackeys spin to the public as
"two parties" and which the collectivist power elites maintain by
waging phony battles every four years, all of which the gullible public buys
into. Yet every year no matter who wins at the polls, government grows larger
and more fascistic. Therefore, all talk about which of these Tweedledum and Tweedledee
institutions is better than the other is a game of "nonsense on
stilts" (to borrow a phrase from the 19th century philosopher, Jeremy
Bentham). Because both parties subscribe to the same fundamental premises,
which manifest in the dictatorial paradigm of fascism, they both end up
tyrannizing our lives.
To those Republican sympathizers
who still hold out hope that the GOP can be some kind of a solution to the
runaway lunacy of today's spendaholics on the
Potomac, I offer exhibit A, Mr. Republican himself, President George W. Bush.
Remove the scales from your eyes America! This man's spending proclivities
(as a percentage of GNP) far exceed those of Bill Clinton's, or Jimmy
Carter's, or LBJ's -- all prototypical "big spenders" that preceded
him and set the standard for fiscal irresponsibility. George Bush Jr. is as
Big Government as you can get! Socialism (or actually fascism) has come to
America via a "conservative" administration! But this is the
inevitable result when both parties subscribe to the SAME flawed fundamental
premises. Those flawed premises are: 1) Government needs to be
centralized and highly interventionist to be effective. And 2) it is
permissible for political legislation to violate individual rights in order
to convey special privileges to groups. It is upon these two dictatorial
premises that both Democrats and Republicans structure the entirety of their policies.
Arbitrary law has trumped objective law as a policy tool for
each of them. Both have abandoned belief in a higher natural law. Both
endorse the wholesale violation of rights. Consequently they both are driving
us toward economic fascism and dictatorship.
This Demopublican
"one-party system" has given us an insufferably oppressive
Leviathan that now takes 50% of our earnings every year to disgorge on
monstrous personal entitlements and welfare handouts, multi-million dollar
congressional pensions, egregious pork barrel projects, farm subsidies,
corporation bailouts, foreign aid giveaways, World Bank loans, energy
industry subsidies, artistic grants, mass busing
programs, regional development programs, revenue sharing programs, and
hundreds of other needless projects and regimental bureaucracies. It has
brought us a national debt of over $6 TRILLION that requires $300 billion
yearly to service. It has saddled us with $43 TRILLION in unfunded
liabilities that will need to be paid in future years. It has bankrupted us
as a nation. It has eroded our will as a people. It has transformed a
resplendent Constitutional system where power resides in the states and
localities into a contemptible "majoritarian despotism" where all
power now resides in a coterie of ruthless Washington power elites who buy
the allegiance of millions of voting dupes every year with bread and
circuses.
What a far cry all this
overweening prodigality is from the Founders' original intent. Such a system
is insanity incarnate. If not radically reformed, it will continue to consume
our freedom and earnings like a swarm of locusts consumes a wheat field until
we in America are no better off than the simple serfs of feudal times. If we
do not gather the forces to stand up to this beast, it will swallow
everything in its path until it has created a wasteland of irredeemable
death. Demopublicanism's ultimate denouement is
apocalypse.
There is only one solution.
Americans must form a viable third (or actually second) political party that
is capable of competing with the tyrannical monopoly of Demopublicanism.
I have outlined an innovative workable strategy for this in my article,
"Gold Money and Equal Tax Rates!" that appeared earlier on this
website. Without a competitive political vision that exposes the nakedness of
the Demopublican emperor, there can be no reprieve
from the path to disaster upon which we are now traveling.
Horseman 3: Pax Americana
Pax Americana has been the unfulfilled
dream of neo-conservative statists ever since the end of the Cold War, but
with the advent of the War on Terrorism, the dream suddenly took a giant step
toward becoming a reality. The Paul Wolfowitz doctrine, first hatched in the
early nineties, has now become the guidelines for the expansion of American
hegemony throughout the world over the next 2-3 decades. This doctrine states
that America needs to abandon the conventional foreign policy model of
national defense and actively pursue a reshaping of
the world, in other words, to get extensively involved in nation building.
[See my article, "Gold and Pax
Americana."]
The Washington Post reported
on April 23rd of this year that, "The administration hopes the US-led
war in Iraq will lead to a crescent of democracies in Iraq, Iran, Syria,
Lebanon, the Israeli occupied territories and Saudi Arabia....'This is a
25-year project,' one three-star general officer said." On the contrary,
this is like Demopublicanism -- insanity incarnate.
Human beings and their cultures are not hunks of sociological clay to be molded by foreign governments through the force of
military technology and troop occupation. They are unique creatures and
institutions that have the right of self-determination.
I love my country and despise the
pacifist dupes of the left who automatically take to the streets to protest
America's interventionist wars abroad, yet eagerly support the federal
Leviathan's interventionist growth at home. I would never associate with
their mindless ilk. But I believe with Edward Abby that "A patriot
must always be ready to defend his country against its own government."
It is our first duty, because the prime danger to a nation's freedom is
always the nature of government itself.
Our government today has become
the most lethal criminal agency in the country. Criminality is defined as
the violation of individual rights, and there is no entity in America today
more destructive of basic rights than the Federal Government in Washington.
It matters not whether it's Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld, or Clinton-Rubin-Talbot
running the show. They're all Orwellian brothers of the New World Order.
They have decided to colonize Iraq
through PREEMPTIVE WAR in order to promote what they call "benevolent
global hegemony" which sadly the American sheep are prone to accepting
as a legitimate goal of a nation's foreign policy.
"What is monumentally
important about all this and completely ignored by the mainstream
press," writes Richard Maybury, "is that
the invasion of Iraq was the test case, a precedent. By attacking a country
that had not attacked us, the [Bush administration] violated international
agreements going all the way back to the 1555 Peace of Augsburg and the 1648
Treaty of Westphalia. They got away with it, so they now intend to
reconstruct the whole Mideast...in their own image and likeness, and not one
American in a thousand understands enough about it to object." [Early
Warning Report, July 2003]
As a result, we will now become
bogged down in a tar pit made up of the tribal vestiges of the old Ottoman
Empire that the Western powers broke up after World War I. The virulent
animosities toward America and the West go back hundreds of years among these
people. Their hatreds and animosities toward each other go back thousands of
years. They see democracy as a violation of the law of their God, and
American culture as the mother of all evils. Yet Washington's black limousine
boys think they can go into this kind of hostile environment and just
rearrange the people and their ideologies to fit the American way of doing
things. This is unbelievable hubris and ignorance regarding history,
humanity, religion, culture, and sane foreign policy. But the die has been
cast; we are now in there, and no administration (liberal or conservative)
will be willing to pull us out for fear of severely losing face. [For a good
introduction to the mess we are in, see Richard Maybury,
The Thousand
Year War in the Mideast.]
Because we have launched Pax Americana with a preemptive
war, we have opened Pandora's Box. There are sure to be other nations that
will now follow our precedent in the upcoming years to settle myriad
grievances with their neighbors through a first
strike. Those who live by preemptive war die by
such a sword. This grievous blunder on our part will be the trigger to
unleash more serious conflagrations in the years ahead as all nations begin
to suffer the pains of a worldwide financial meltdown and look desperately
for ways out of their economic suffering? After all, it was the economic
suffering of the German people, spawned by the Treaty of Versailles,
that brought Hitler and his lunacy down upon Europe. The hubris of Pax Americana has put us on a path to apocalypse.
Horseman 4: The Kondratieff Cycle
The Kondratieff Cycle is a theory
of how economies expand and contract. It was formulated by Nikolai
Kondratieff who was a Soviet economist during the 1920's. He discovered,
through extensive research on prices and other economic data along with
sociological and cultural studies stretching back hundreds of years, that
there was a 50-60 year grand cycle that capitalist economies go through. They
rise, they level off, and then they decline and crash. Out of the decline,
they then renew and start the cycle all over again. He traced this cycle back
to 1789 and showed in rather convincing style that it was a credible tool of
analysis as to how capitalism would progress.
The first cycle he studied began
in 1789 and ended in 1849. The second began in 1849 and ended in 1896. The
third went from 1896 to 1945. Since Kondratieff was analyzing the cycle in
the 1920's, this is where his studies ended -- halfway through the third
cycle. But he saw that the decline and crash period was beginning for the
third cycle, which we now know extended through the thirties and forties.
Unfortunately for Kondratieff, he had discovered something that his communist
rulers did not want to know -- that capitalist systems renew themselves
rather than permanently self-destruct as Marx had predicted. He was sent to
Siberia for his discovery, and apparently died sometime in the 1930's.
But his followers today, such as Ian Gordon, carried on the theory. They have
divided the cycle into four phases, Spring-Summer-Autumn-Winter, and have
shown where the fourth cycle began about 1945-1949 and is now starting its
winter close, due to end sometime around 2010-2015. The cycle has been
slightly extended this time because it is tied into the inflation of money,
human psychology, and the length of a human lifetime, and lifetimes today are
longer than they were in the 19th century. They last around 70 years now
instead of 60. So the winter phase of the fourth cycle is happening right now
in 2003.
Technically speaking, the
Kondratieff Cycle is not really a product of the Marxian philosophical train
wreck like the other three horsemen above. It goes back at least 215 years to
1789. But since its origin lies with inflationary monetary policy, it has
been greatly exacerbated since the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913.
This is because the Fed greatly expanded the practice of inflation over what
the decentralized banking system of the 19th century was capable of doing.
Prior to 1913, only small Kondratieffs affected our
economy. Since then, Big Kondratieff has descended upon us. This can be
observed in the fact that the booms and busts prior to 1913 were milder
affairs. But after 1913, the boom of the 20's and the following crash of the
30's were whoppers. And the recent boom of the 90's has been a gargantuan
whopper. This is ominous, because it tells us that the crash period we are
now entering will be the worst that history has ever recorded. Thus, because
of the creation of the Federal Reserve in the U.S. in 1913 and its ability to
explosively expand fiat money to levels never before dreamed of, we can say
Big Kondratieff is a product of 20th century banking, which is a product of
the Marxian philosophical train wreck of the 1900-1920 era.
What Kondratieff theory tells us
is that the boom-bust cycle that inflationary monetary
policy brings about creates prodigious amounts of debt that eventually
overwhelm society. A period of liquidation then must follow in order
for the economy to regain its health. When Kondratieff theory is integrated
with Ludwig von Mises' Austrian analysis of inflationary
monetary policy, one is presented with a startlingly clear picture of WHY and
HOW our economic troubles over the past 65 years have come about. One then
sees the connecting link of factors that cause the volatile boom-bust nature
of modern economic life. [To learn more about Mises
and Austrian economic theory, see www.mises.org. To learn more about Kondratieff
theory, contact Ian Gordon.]
Inflationary monetary policy
(through fractional reserve banking) is the evil seed that once planted will
spawn some very noxious and destructive weeds. Fractional reserve banking
began in the U.S. in the 19th century, but because we were still on the gold
standard and still maintained a decentralized banking system, it was muted in
its destructive effects. Our big troubles began when we created the Federal
Reserve in 1913 and went off the gold standard in 1933. This greatly
magnified the boom-bust nature of Kondratieff. Compounding these two
disasters was our adoption of Keynesian economic fallacies and Roosevelt's
New Deal government aggrandizement. The last 65 years have been a horrifying
exercise in piling disastrous policies on top of the evils of Keynes and
Roosevelt (e.g., Eisenhower's merging of the political parties, LBJ's Great
Society, Nixon's closing of the gold window, Reagan's phony tax cuts,
Clinton's pseudo strong dollar, etc.). The final coup de grace of the 90's
has been the gift of Greenspan & Co. -- his wild, hallucinatory expansion
of the money supply that culminated in the blow off top of the stock market.
A long devastating Kondratieff winter now awaits us. This is the price that
excess brings, and there has never been an era of history marked with more
excess than the past 65 years. Every standard of propriety in every facet of
our lives -- political, economic, cultural, social, sexual, artistic, etc. --
has been trashed. There are no rules, no ethics, no
limits. Amorality dominates. Keynesianism corrupts. Government expands.
Freedom recedes. Lives dissipate. The decline and crash phase is upon us.
Somewhere Nikolai Kondratieff is saying, "I told you so."
What Can We Conclude from This?
A mongrel form of Marxism took
over America in the early 20th century and created a "collectivist
curvature of the mind" among the reigning intelligentsia. Out of this
collectivist curvature, came the philosophical train wreck of the early 20th
century that has brought us today's New Horsemen of the Apocalypse. These
four horsemen, Keynesianism, Demopublicanism, Pax Americana, and Kondratieff, are now riding down upon
our society and driving us closer and closer to the horrendous maelstrom that
will end the world as we know it.
Dust clouds of sophistry, propaganda,
and gullibility still hide the horsemen from clear view by the people, but
the salient and strong minded are not fooled. They see through the
establishment's evasive tricks and perceive what is coming. They understand
that men cannot continue forever to get from life more than they put into
life -- which is the evil ideology that Marx and his Keynesian spawn have
conned modernity into believing can be done. "You can be like
gods," was the whispered enticement 90 years ago. "You can create
wealth without work. You can have Utopia without strife. It will all be so
easy. You need only to purge yourselves of the senseless anachronisms of the
Founding Fathers. You need only to renounce gold and the free-market. You can
have power and riches beyond your wildest dreams."
Never in history has a nation
confronted a coalescence of tidal forces such as these. One must go back to
the 4th and 5th century and the 200-year fall of Rome to find parallels.
Since the speed of information transfer in today's world is greatly
accelerated over that of Rome's day, we will not take 200 years to descend
into the maelstrom and perhaps a new Dark Ages. My guess is that we will do
it in about a third of the time it took Rome to collapse. Since it can
legitimately be said we've been declining as a society for the past 50 years
since Eisenhower's ushering in of Demopublicanism
in 1952, we have precious little time left in my opinion.
Cataclysm is headed our way. I
speak not religiously here, but historically, politically, economically. This
is not an "end times" scenario. We will endure as a nation, but in
what form -- slave or free? If freedom is to survive the cataclysmic times
ahead, it will be because there are still those who can see the big picture,
still those who understand that natural law rules all men, still those who
possess the contrarian will to fight with word and deed -- not for what is
popular, but for what is TRUE. The first requisite of all such contrarian
fighters is to take dead aim at the four horsemen riding down upon our
society today. Spread the
word of their danger. Time is short.
Nelson Hultberg
Americans
for a Free Republic
September
2, 2003
www.afr.org
hultberg@afr.org
|
|