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September 02, 2003

Apocalypse This Way Comes
by Nelson Hultberg

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 Willy 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 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
Americans for a Free Republic

Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Executive Director of Americans for a Free Republic www .afr.org. His articles have appeared in such publications as The Dallas Morning News, Insight, The Freeman, Liberty, and The Social Critic, as well as numerous Internet sites. He is the author of Why We Must Abolish The Income Tax And The IRS (1997) and Breaking the Demopublican Monopoly(2004). He is presently finishing a book on political-economic philosophy entitled The Golden Mean: The Case for Libertarian Politics and Conservative Values.

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