Turning Points: 1945-2010
Remnant Review, Vol. 37, No. 5 (May 22, 2010)
Everything about life is governed by the principle: no turning back. The famous poem by Omar Khayyam begins: "The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on, and all your tears cannot wipe out half a line." We know this from an early age. Nevertheless, there are key events in a man's life that define him for the rest of his life. These events remind us that there is no turning back. Marriage is such an event. The birth of a child is such an event. We cannot remember most of the events that take place in our lives, but we can look back and recognize that certain events made us what we are. We can identify these events as turning points in our lives.
I think the same principle applies to nations and, sometimes, to the entire world. There are key events that wind up in the history books. There would be no way of making sense of the past if even one of these events were not covered in the history books. Of course, historians disagree as to which events are crucial, as well as how much importance to assign to each of them. But we do know, in retrospect, that a particular event was uniquely governed by the principle of "no turning back." The event shaped much of what followed.
The characteristic feature of such an event is that it is the culmination of a long process that preceded it. Things bump along, day by day, year by year. They are familiar events. We may take little notice of them. We forget most of them. Then, all of a sudden, without warning, an event takes place that fundamentally transforms the world that had produced those day-by-day, year-by-year events.
The preceding build-up was crucial in the overall process. Historians spend a lot of time talking about the events that led up to the big events. Here, historians really disagree. But they do not generally disagree about the crucial events -- only about how things led up to them, and why events followed from them in a particular way.
I want to talk about the events that have taken place in my lifetime that I regard as turning-point events. I am arguing that had these events not taken place, the world in which we live would be fundamentally different.
One of the games that historians play is to imagine alternative histories. What would history have been like if a particular event had not taken place? One of my professors in graduate school is a first-rate economic historian, Roger Ransom. Years later, he wrote a book on what America would be like if the Confederacy had won the Civil War. These mental exercises are curiosities, but whenever we think of a turning-point event, in the back of our minds is some image of what the world would have been like had this event not taken place. We cannot escape some variation of alternative history.
Here is my list of turning-point events in my lifetime.
The most important event of my life I do not remember. I was too young to remember it. I don't think anybody reading this report will disagree with me when I say that the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 fundamentally re-shaped the world in which we live. While it is true that the explosion that took place three weeks before at Alamogordo, New Mexico, brought forth the atomic age, only a handful of people were aware of this at the time. On August 6, 1945, the whole world knew. The whole world knew that the world that we had grown up in was no longer safe. The power of technology to re-shape our world, without warning, without defense, was now in front of us. The scientists had developed a technology that was capable of killing 100,000 people or more within a matter of seconds.
It was clear to anybody who thought about this at the time that this was merely the first step. There would be larger bombs in the future. That came true in 1952, when the United States detonated a hydrogen bomb. But the hydrogen bomb was not a turning-point event. It was simply an extension of what had already taken place. It was not a radical transformation of existing technological developments. In contrast, the atomic bomb was fundamentally different from everything that had ever gone before. Nothing in man's history prepared the general public for the atomic bomb. We had to adjust to the reality of that technology within a matter of hours. This technology had come out of nowhere. There was no inkling that any such technology existed. There was no understanding, just before the world was told of the event, that the world we had grown up in could be obliterated in a matter of hours. It was not just that a city could be destroyed. It was that no city was safe. There was no technological defense against the implementation of this radical new technology.
We live in the year 2010. None of this has changed. The only thing that has changed is the matter of who owns which bombs, and which technologies will be most likely to deliver such bombs, and what the retaliation could be.
As the price of this technology falls, it is conceivable that a non-state revolutionary group will gain possession of such a weapon. From the time that the first detonation goes off in a city anywhere in the world, the world which we have lived in since 1945 will not be the same. We can think about all the implications of this, such as what we individually would do within the first 24 hours after such a detonation. We can think about this all we like, but what we know is this: the world in which we will live after such a detonation will be fundamentally different from the world in which we live today. This is an extension of the existing technology, but it nevertheless represents a radical escalation of the threat to all of us. Price competition can produce a new reality.
When only the Soviet Union threatened us with atomic war, it was possible to design a series of retaliatory events that would be so devastating that the Soviets would never risk the war. On at least two occasions, that theory came very close to a test. In the final hours of the October crisis of 1962, we came perilously close to World War III. A quarter-century later, in 1983, the decision of one Russian military officer, Stanislav Petrov, not to launch a retaliatory strike against what was presumed by his superiors to be a first strike by the United States kept nuclear holocaust from taking place. I regard that decision as the most important single decision of modern times. (There may have been other similar incidents that we never heard about.)
As it turned out, the horrendous implications of a nuclear war were so great that the world avoided one. That worked for as long as the bombs were controlled by states. The day that a non-state combatant detonates a nuclear bomb anywhere in the world is the day that everything will change. That is the opinion of my friend Sam Cohen, who was one of the men who worked on the development of the bomb in New Mexico, and who invented the neutron bomb.
In the fall of 1957, I stood outside the record store where I worked. Everyone who had been in the store was beside me. All along the block were other people standing on the sidewalk. We were looking straight ahead. We stood just four blocks up a steep hill from the Pacific Ocean. The sun had just gone down. We stared across the ocean at the horizon. All of a sudden, someone said: "There it is." At the edge of the horizon, a light had just appeared. It was bright. Within seconds, it ascended from the edge of the horizon where the ocean met the sky and continued upward above us. It was moving at enormous speed. Everyone's eyes followed it as it soared overhead, and then we all turned to the east as it continued its journey across the sky and down to the horizon of the hill a few blocks to the east. That was Sputnik.
Actually, it wasn't Sputnik. It was the second-stage rocket that had launched Sputnik into its orbit. We were there at the perfect time of day. The sun had gone below the horizon. It reflected off that rocket brightly, making the visual image all that more memorable. Only one other time did I see a rocket in the sky. At the time, I did not know what it was. It was like fire in the sky, hanging above the horizon. It just hung there. A lot of us saw it; none of us knew what it was. Then, as is normal for most people, since we could not explain it, we walked away and gave no more thought to it. The next day, I read that it had been a Soviet satellite that had been in orbit for many years, and had fallen back to earth. It burned up when it hit the atmosphere.
The launching of Sputnik by the Soviet Union sent a message to the whole world. That message was clear: nuclear war could come from the sky, without warning, delivered by a rocket. We had known this was possible in theory, but we had not faced this before. Only one year earlier, the movie Forbidden Planet had begun with a description of the coming of the rocketship age. It began with the words: "In the final decade of the 21st century. . . ." One year later, the age of rockets began. Within 12 years, the United States landed two men on the moon. We had gone from a Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon serial in the late 1930s, both starring Buster Crabbe, to the real thing in 1957. Mankind would no longer be limited by the force of gravity to a terrestrial ball. Science fiction became science with one extraordinary event. I saw it with my own eyes.
From the day of the launching of Sputnik, United States had to develop retaliatory power, or so military doctrine decreed. It was not possible to block an attack from outer space; it was only possible to counter such an attack with an even more devastating attack. Within a few years, this became the doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD). That doctrine established that the civilian populations of the Soviet Union and the United States would be held captive by the other side's technology. We did not know this at the time. The faster the rockets became, and the cheaper the rockets became, the more it was clear that there was no defense against nuclear holocaust. It might be possible to shoot down a bomber; it was not possible to shoot down a missile. Anyway, we didn't think it was possible.
In 1960, American women were offered a new product. That product would enable them to avoid pregnancy. It was commonly known as the pill. It was clear to moralists at the time, especially moralists in the Roman Catholic Church, that any attempt to thwart birth control was in big trouble. The pill's cost was too low, and the ease-of-use was too great. They understood that fundamental principle of economics: when the price falls, more will be demanded. They warned that this would lead to a transformation of morality. They were correct.
In principle, that transformation had begun in the late 19th century, and it had continued for the first 60 years of the 20th century. But it was also clear that the pill represented a fundamental departure from all previous technologies of contraception. It would now be possible for women to make the decision. The decision will be made on a daily basis, pill by pill, and the heat of the moment would not disrupt the plans of those women.
In 1958, the birth rate in the United States peaked at just under four children per family. That rate was cut in half over the next generation. It fell even more rapidly in Western Europe. The technology changed the social morality. The risk of the negative sanction of pregnancy for unmarried women was reduced. Normally, we do not think that technology changes morality, but that assumption is incorrect. There was a qualitative leap of efficiency with the pill.
That leap validated and reinforced the decisions of Westerners to reduce the number of children in the family. From the date the pill came on the market, it was clear to anyone who understood statistics that the Social Security system was doomed: insufficient workers to pay for retired people. A year earlier, a teacher in my high school had warned us that the Social Security system was going to go bankrupt in our lifetimes. He was probably the only high school teacher in Southern California who warned the students about this. He was later told this by a Social Security worker who was about to retire. The worker told him that only his students were ever prepared in advance to ask questions about the statistical solvency of the program. He said that his classes were the only ones he ever feared to go into.
That transformation of morality, which made a new morality less expensive than it had ever been before, changed the finances of the entire Western world. We are living in the aftermath of that technological change. In the year 2010, Social Security has gone negative fiscally. It went negative the last time in 1983, when it had to be reformed. There has to be another transformation of the program to make it solvent, and this is now highly unlikely politically. We know what is going to happen. The system is going to go bust. The baby bust that began in 1959 has accelerated, and the statistical bust of the Social Security system has accelerated with it.
With the move to family size of less than two children per family means a new society. Whatever groups are dominant today will not be dominant in 100 years or 200 years. The groups that will be dominant are those groups that decide, for religious or cultural reasons, to have more than two children per family. The demographics are inevitable. Demography is the only field of social science that really leads to accurate long-term predictions.
It is clear what is happening to Western Europe. It is committing suicide. It is clear that Muslims will inherit Western Europe unless they also adopt the outlook regarding family size that predominates among the old European stock. Yes, they may change their minds. The fact of the matter is this: the nation in the Middle East with the lowest birth rate is Iran. Iran's birth rate is not much higher than Germany's, and when I say Germany's, I mean non-Muslim Germany's. So, trends can change, but they have not changed yet sufficiently to indicate that the original European racial stock will prevail in the control of the continent. That is a product of the pill, and also of the moral outlook that became dominant, once the cost got low enough and the ease of use got high enough.
In 1962, I heard a lecture by Austrian School economist Hans Sennholz. He told a group of undergraduates that silver coins would begin to disappear in the near future. He said that this was an aspect of an ancient economic law known as Gresham's Law: "bad money drives out good money." As I recall, he did not elaborate on the details of that law, which really says that government controls on the exchange rate between monetary units will lead to the disappearance of the artificially undervalued monetary unit. That is a lot harder to remember than "bad money drives out good money."
Beginning in June of 1963, when I got my first paycheck from my first full-time job, I put all the money I could afford into silver coins I bought at a local bank. By the end of the summer, I had accumulated over $1000 in face value of silver coins. Then I moved to Philadelphia. Within a month, I read in a Philadelphia newspaper that coins were becoming scarce on the East Coast tollways. They couldn't get enough silver coins at the banks to give change to people. The toll booth departments began sending representatives to churches on Monday mornings, buying up the silver coins that had been donated by members on Sunday. In 1964, the government announced a new phony silver coin: copper coins covered with a laminate that looked silvery.
This had taken place in the declining years of the Roman Empire. The government had debased the currency, and had attempted to cover up this debasement by covering the coins with phony silver-looking laminate. Now it had come to the United States.
I don't know if most Americans perceived the nature of the transformation, but it was clear to me. It was clear that we were not going back to the days in which there would be stable money. It was clear that inflation was ahead, and that the government would fund part of its deficits through sales of its debt to the Federal Reserve System. I knew enough about central banking at that time to understand the implications of this event. The disappearance of the coins in the fall of 1963 was an indication that the United States would eventually be forced to go off the gold standard. The bad money that had driven silver coinage out of circulation would eventually create an international crisis in the monetary system. The general public was unaware of this, but I knew enough about Austrian economics very in the fall of 1963 to understand that the dollar would eventually fall in value.
Two events took place in 1965 that fundamentally transformed the United States. The first was the signing into law of the Medicare program. The second was the signing into law of a new immigration bill.
Senator Teddy Kennedy was the big promoter of the immigration bill. President Johnson was happy to sign it into law. The reason they were so happy about it was that they fully understood that, over the next generation, immigrants coming into the United States would be poor, and a lot of them would go on welfare. They understood that these immigrants would have children, and those children would be American citizens. They understood that those children for the most part would vote for the Democratic Party. The pro-immigration politicians were self-conscious about this. They looked at the numbers and drew accurate conclusions. The Republicans could not stop them. All of this has played out in Southern California. It is playing out in New Mexico. The battle zone is now in Arizona, but, over time, it is clear that, unless the state's Mexican-Americans want to stop the influx of Mexicans across the border, the Arizona law is going to be repealed. The same shift is going on in the state of Texas.
Whether most of the children and grandchildren of recent immigrants will vote for Democrats is problematic. Probably they will. But, at some point, there is going to be a breakdown of the financial system in the United States. There is going to be a breakdown of the Federal welfare system. This is because of the other law of 1965, the Medicare law. Medicare now is the elephant in the living room. Everyone knows it is going to bankrupt the Federal government. Nobody cares. It didn't bother George W. Bush when he pushed Congress to vote for huge increases of expenditures to cover prescription drugs. It didn't bother Congress this year when President Obama pushed to create compulsory health insurance.
The civil government of the modern world is seen as a messianic state. A savior god must heal people. This means the state. It is crucial for all governments that hold to this doctrine of the messianic state that they offer comprehensive health-care coverage. The government wants control over life and death, over health and disease, and control over who gets what and on what terms. That means that governments will control the medical system. Lyndon Johnson signed into law a law that guaranteed the bankruptcy of the messianic state.
There is no question that there is going to be a great default in every Western industrial country, and the most important single reason for this default in every country is the government-funded health care system. The amazing thing is that anybody with any knowledge of the statistics of these programs knows this is going to take place. Yet the governments are incapable politically of reversing the course. They are going to stay the course over the fiscal falls. They are going to bust their own treasuries.
Most Americans who are over the age of 60 say that they can remember where they were when they first heard that President Kennedy had been shot. I can remember. But another event is far more clear in my mind.
It was a Sunday afternoon: August 15, 1971. I was preparing to move to New York, where I had accepted a position on the senior staff of the Foundation for Economic Education. I was about to begin my lifetime career. I got a telephone call. At the other end of the line was my friend Bob Warford. Bob was a bluegrass banjo player, probably the best in the West coast. He was an undergraduate at the University of California, Riverside, and I had met him because I had a bluegrass radio show on the local university FM station. He told me that Nixon had just given his speech in which he had said that the United States government would no longer honor its agreement to sell gold at $35 an ounce to any nation or national central bank. Nixon also had imposed price and wage controls. Warford knew I would be horrified, and I surely was. I had expected a hike in the price of gold at some point, and I had recommended this publicly. I had not expected that he would simply close the gold window altogether. He floated the dollar, meaning that he had abolished fixed exchange rates. I recognized that this was a good idea, since price controls on the exchange rate currencies always produces Gresham's law. The thought of comprehensive price and wage controls was anathema to me. I knew what would happen: massive shortages.
This was a turning point in American financial history. I had no doubt that this would fundamentally transform the nation's economy. I knew that he couldn't keep the controls on forever, but I also knew it was unlikely that the Bretton Woods gold exchange standard would ever be reestablished. It was the end of any monetary restraint on the Federal Reserve System. I expected inflation, and that is what took place over the next decade. We entered the worst phase of peacetime inflation in the history of the United States.
The Chamber of Commerce supported his decision. The national Association of Manufacturers supported it, too. It was clear to me that the elite in the business world did not have a clue about supply and demand. They had no comprehension of fundamental principles of free-market economics. They were simply a bunch of price controlling, statist, special pleaders without principle.
I had expected something like this for a decade, and I recognized at the time that this was a turning point. There was no going back.
Two years later, in 1973, OPEC announced an oil embargo in the United States. Officially, this was in response to America's support of the State of Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. I always have thought that that was Saudi Arabia's way to force the other Islamic oil exporters into line. The real reason was that the Saudis understood exactly what the abandonment of the gold standard meant for the dollar. They were sitting on top of a valuable commodity, and they wanted to make certain that their assets would not be sold for a declining Western currency.
Little did they know that there had been a fundamental change in the world monetary system as a result of Nixon's decision to close the gold window. From that point on, American economic policy in international affairs was to force governments to buy Treasury debt as a substitute for holding gold. Nations that export to the United States re-cycle the dollars received for goods. This policy is still with us. For four decades, the United States government has persuaded foreign central banks of nations that export goods to us to hold down the value of their currencies by inflating their domestic currencies and using Treasury debt as the collateral to be put on the central banks' books as assets. The United States government has taken advantage of the mercantilist impulse abroad, knowing that foreign governments do not want to lose exports to the United States because of a declining dollar in relation to their own currencies. So, foreign governments pressured their central banks to expand the domestic money supply, so as to be able to keep pace with the decline of the dollar. Foreign central banks have bought United States government debt as a way to collateralize the expansion of their own domestic currencies. The Arabs did not understand this in 1973, but by the early 1980s, they did understand it.
The Arab oil embargo led to a quadrupling of the price of oil. It caught the United States off guard, because it was widely believed at the time the price of oil would probably go down. One of the most respected academic economists who specialized in the field of oil and energy economics was Kenneth Adelman. He predicted in 1971 that the price of oil would probably fall to a dollar a barrel. He never lost his reputation for what has to be one of the most preposterously erroneous forecasts in the history of academia.
People in 1971 really did believe that oil would continue to fall in price. They did not understand that in 1970, the United States had reached peak oil. At that point, state controls over oil output in the United States ended. Prior to that time, especially the state of Texas, limitations were put on the pumping of oil, so as to hold up the price of oil. Domestically, there had been an oil cartel, and that cartel did not want to face falling oil prices. As of 1970, those restrictions were eliminated. The reason was simple: output was maximized. This had been predicted in 1956 By Shell Oil specialist, M. King Hubbert. He had predicted the decline of America's oil production to the year.
For the United States, the next major event took place in 1975. The United States was in a severe recession. President Nixon had resigned the year before. There was a kind of constitutional crisis in the United States. At that point, South Vietnam fell to North Vietnam forces.
There was one symbol of this defeat that is with us still. There was a photograph of people escaping from the roof of a building onto an American helicopter. It was believed at the time that that had been on the roof of the American embassy. That was not true; it was another building. That symbol of Americans getting on board a helicopter -- the last helicopter out -- was a symbol of the new realities of military power. The United States had been defeated by a bunch of young men in black pajamas. This was the first defeat that the nation had experienced in its history.
Psychologically, that was a key event. Americans finally shrugged this off, but from that point on, in the back of their minds, they knew that we had been defeated on the battlefield. The were rival stories about why we lost, but there is no doubt that we had lost.
In 1983, Ronald Reagan backtracked on his policy of cutting taxes. In 1981, he had successfully persuaded Congress to cut marginal tax rates, but now he faced the bankruptcy of Social Security. Legally, Social Security was bankrupt. It was not bringing in enough money to pay for expenditures. In 1977, President Carter was able to get a law passed which he promised would keep Social Security solvent into the 21st century. It did not keep Social Security solvent for more than six years. At that point, Reagan accepted the advice of what was known as the Greenspan Commission, and hiked taxes. The Social Security tax would be paid on an ever-increasing cap (now at $106,500). From that point on, Social Security recipients would have to pay income taxes on the money they received from the program.
Not many people at the time understood what had gone on, but it was clear to me that this was another turning point. What I have been told in 1959 by my high school teacher, and what I had learned in 1977 with Carter's attempt to restructure the program, now had come true again. It was clear to me that my high school teacher was correct, that the program would eventually go bankrupt. There would come a point that a politician would not dare to go before the public and again impose new taxes or cut benefits to make the Social Security system solvent.
Since 1983, there has been no major legislation changing the Social Security system. It does not seem politically possible at this point for the system to be revised sufficiently to keep it from going bust. It is now in negative territory, and it will remain in negative territory. Money is coming out of the general fund into the Social Security Administration. Always in the past, except in 1983, the surplus of Social Security tax revenues over Social Security payments has been used officially to reduce the on-budget deficit of the United States government. This has been a giant deception, of course, because the liabilities were always increasing: IOU's in the Trust Fund. But, because Social Security is considered an off-budget liability, the politicians used the surplus in Social Security's program to justify claiming that the deficit had been reduced. Now, the deficit will not only not be reduced, it will escalate. Every dime that is paid to the Social Security system in interest must come out of the general fund.
On August 19-21, 1991, the Soviet Union went out of existence. This was the most monumental historical event of my lifetime. I regard it as even more important than the dropping of the atom bombs. For the first time in history, an empire had committed suicide. There had been no bloodshed. It was not the result of an armed revolution. Communists simply surrendered control over the government to Yeltsin, and then either went out of the country or disappeared inside the country. The Cold War was over.
The justification for the massive military build-up on both sides of the Iron Curtain ceased to exist. This is a major threat to the military-industrial complex in the United States, and of course military budgets were not cut back on the western side of the Iron Curtain. But the justification of these expenditures was getting more difficult to make.
Communism collapsed as an ideology when it collapsed as an empire. Over a decade before, Deng Xio Peng had dropped communism as an economic ideology when he freed up agriculture in Communist China in 1978-79. That led to the greatest expansion of economic growth on the broadest base in the history of man. By 1991, it was becoming clear that China was growing rapidly. It was not clear that it might become the dominant economic force of the 21st century. It was clear that the free market had freed up the creativity and productivity of hundreds of millions of people in Red China.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, communism as an idea sank without a trace. It became a laughingstock in Western universities overnight. People who had been taken seriously because they were experts in Marxism found they were not taken seriously any longer. The used book bins of bookstores around the country began filling up with books on Marxism, communism, Soviet policy, and "what Marx really meant." Overnight, the most powerful ideological rival to Western democracy simply folded up shop. Nothing like this had ever happened before in the history of man. The symbol of the failure of communism was the defection of the communist leaders in the Soviet Union in 1991.
The next event of real significance took place in 1998. It didn't seem all that important at the time, but its impact rapidly escalated. An obscure manager of an obscure website that specialized in Hollywood gossip was tipped off to an event. He was told that Newsweek magazine had suppressed a story about the President of the United States. The story involved a sexual liaison with a young staff member. Matt Drudge posted the story of the suppressed article. From around the world, his website began to get hits. Newsweek within hours had to admit it was true; before the end of the week, the magazine had posted the story.
Events escalated rapidly. The President denied the whole thing. He denied under oath. He committed perjury. Then he was impeached by the House of Representatives for perjury. The Senate did not convict, but he became the second president in American history to be impeached. For all the activities in his eight years in office, in the textbooks he will be remembered only for the fact that he was the first president after Andrew Johnson to have been impeached. The textbooks will have to say why he was impeached. He will go down in history as the man who got caught. The textbooks will not talk about the cigar, but they will have to talk about Monica Lewinsky.
The reason why this was so important is that it was a representative case. For the first time in American history, or anybody's history, someone had broken through the gatekeeping system by means of a new technology that was widespread across the face of the earth. There had been a leak, and the leak got picked up on the World Wide Web. From that point on, the gatekeepers lost their position.
For the first time in the history of mankind, it is no longer possible for any group to control ideas, except in the most conspiratorial setting. Any idea that can be put into text, or these days, put into a short video, is going to go on the Web. There is no way that these ideas can be stopped, other than by shutting down the Web. Communist China did this with one of its provinces last year, and only recently allowed Web access for residents of that province. But to do this, everything associated with the Web has to be taken down. That means information regarding current events, everything connected with financial transactions, and e-mail. Any nation that attempts to shut down the Web commits economic suicide. It cannot be done. It is too late.
With no gatekeepers to control the flow of ideas, governments and elites can no longer shield themselves from rival interpretations of reality. This has never happened before. The social systems of the world must now adjust to a completely new way to price information. The price of getting information out today is essentially zero. Word of mouse has taken over. There is no going back.
On September 11, 2001, four hijacked planes produced three attacks, and two of the attacks became the most important symbols of the 21st century. The collapse of the two buildings that the planes hit are indelibly in the minds of Americans and most Europeans. The collapse of the third building that was not hit, and whose collapse was announced on British television about 10 minutes before it collapsed, is not widely remembered. But the video of collapse of that building is available all over the Web. That British TV video has undermined the confidence of tens of millions of people in the government's official story as to what happened. This officially unexplainable event continues to undermine the legitimacy of the American government. It is not going to go away.
The events of 9/11 led to the transformation of the American mindset. For the first time since 1814, America was attacked on its own shores. Second, non-state aggressors had accomplished the feat. They were mostly from Saudi Arabia, but over the next two years, the Bush Administration did what it could to convince people that most of them had been Iraqis.
This event led to the Patriot Act. It led to the invasion of Afghanistan, where we are now still attempting to suppress unnamed enemies. We were there in 2001 to find Osama bin Laden, but he remains at large. If you look on the FBI website, you find that he is one of the most wanted criminals, but he is wanted for his organizing of the attacks on American embassies in 1998. There is no mention of 9/11, no mention of the fact that he supposedly mastermind that attack. (http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/terrorists/terbinladen.htm)
It is always risky to identify a particular event as a turning point within 30 days of that event.
All of the events that I have discussed may not qualify as turning point events in the thinking of my own readers, let alone the general public. But, I shall push ahead.
I believe that April 23, 2010, will be regarded as a turning-point event. On that day, the premier of Greece announced that the country would have to have a bailout in some form in order to keep from having to default on its debt. This meant that the financial crisis had extended from subprime borrowers in the United States to the largest banks in the United States and the largest banks of Europe and now to a member nation in the European Union.
Officials of the other nations for two weeks attempted to discount the importance of the threat, coming to no agreement on what should be done, hinting that perhaps as much a $60 billion would be allocated to solve it. Then, on one Sunday afternoon in early May, the leaders agreed that almost $1 trillion would be necessary to enable Greece and the other nations that might follow Greece to keep from having to default.
I believe that that will go down in history as the beginning of the end of the European Union. It will go down in history as the beginning of the end of the New World Order. The attempt that began before World War I to consolidate Europe into a United States of Europe has failed.
For almost a century, the insiders of Europe and the insiders of the United States have cooperated with each other in the development of a United States of Europe. Two world wars intervened, which kept this from happening. But, step-by-step, treaty by treaty, secret meeting by secret meeting, the insiders created something that began to look like the United States of Europe. I think there is no possibility now that project, begun before World War I, will come to fruition. I do not think they will be able to get the voters of northern Europe to guarantee the solvency of the spendthrift nations of the Mediterranean. Any attempt to do this from this point on will lead to the defeat of any political party in northern Europe that suggests that it is the obligation of those in the northern tier to support financially the taxpayers of those in the Southern tier. The game is over. Well, maybe not, but it is in the fourth quarter, and the forces of this union are ahead by what is going to prove an insurmountable lead.
There was an event that was announced this week that may even dwarf the events of April 23. Craig Venter, a true genius, has now created synthetic life. Life created in the laboratory is no longer science fiction. He did not clone it; he created it from chemicals. (http://bit.ly/VenterLife)This is the man whose company broke the genome code. Man has now created what appears to be life. This may turn out to be the most important breakthrough event of the 21st century. The implications are staggering. When we think of biological weaponry, we think of the potential for evil. Of this we can be sure: this was step one. There will be many steps from this point on.
So, we come to the end of this edition of Remnant Review. What are the lessons I have learned? First, that technology continues to advance, and that it will have extraordinary implications for society. Second, these implications cannot be foreseen by the general public, even after they have been introduced.
I am happy that I was here to see all this. I have seen the best laid plans of insiders and manipulators and special-interest groups come to near fruition, only to lead to disasters that call their leadership into question.
I have seen a push for internationalism, and I see a stronger push in the opposite direction.
I have seen the advancement of technology, which appears to strengthen the hand of a centralized state, and then I have seen the development of rival technologies to transfer power and influence back to individuals.
I have seen the plans of ruthless men with enormous power turn to dust in their mouths. Lyndon Johnson got his laws passed, but he was forced out of office in disgrace. Richard Nixon closed the gold window, but he left office in disgrace, the only President ever to have resigned.
This much we know: technology will get cheaper. This much we know: when the price of anything falls, more is demanded.