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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.

© 2004 Nelson Hultberg
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