 Apocalypse This Way
Comes
Nelson Hultberg
nelshultberg@aol.com
September 3, 2003
Horseman #1: Keynesian
Monetary Policy
Horseman #2: Demopublican
Political Control
Horseman #3: Pax Americana
Horseman #4: The Kondratieff Cycle
What Can We Conclude from This?
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 'til
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 spiderweb 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-Rumsfield, 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@canaccord.com.]
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 Kondrateiff, 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
September 3, 2003
Email:
nelshultberg@aol.com
 Nelson Hultberg is
a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas. His articles have appeared
in such publications as The Dallas Morning News, the San
Antonio Express-News, Insight, Liberty, The Social Critic, Ideas
On Liberty, and The AIER Report.
He is the author
of Why We Must Abolish The Income Tax And The IRS (laissezfairebooks.com
and amazon.com), and is presently finishing a book on political-economic
philosophy entitled Reality's Golden Mean: The Case for Libertarian
Politics and Conservative Values.
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