by Mike Gray
Columnist Robert Ringer has been predicting a Day of Reckoning for almost thirty years, yet the culprit—big government—has proven especially nimble in evading the consequences of its recklessness:
. . . I must admit that I sometimes feel like Wile E. Coyote. Every time I believe the government is trapped by economic reality, I hear that infamous “Beep Beep” and end up scratching my head. With its high-speed printing presses, its ability to borrow virtually unlimited sums of money and a monopoly on the use of force, government always seems to escape the consequences of its actions and lives to see another day. But unless someone figures out how to make gold out of paper money real soon, the inevitable is already written in stone.
The fact that such a reckoning has been avoided thus far does not guarantee that it won’t happen, however. It’s very easy to argue that the current situation is far worse that any we’ve faced in the past three decades. Ringer sees two possible outcomes ahead, neither of which is at all pleasant to contemplate:
One path to economic judgment day is for the government to allow market forces to rule, which, because of decades of government meddling in the economy, would surely bring about a full-scale deflationary depression. Though the iPod, flat-screen-TV, eat-out-four-nights-a-week crowd doesn’t want to hear about it, the truth is that a deflationary economic judgment day would be a good thing because it would cleanse the economy of artificially high wages, profligate spending and malinvestment.
You don’t have to be Nostradamus to predict how the federal government would react to that proposal. The other path is grimmer, likely involving a societal meltdown:
The second possibility for economic judgment day is runaway inflation, which I have been predicting for the past 30 years. This would almost certainly lead to social chaos and anarchy, more likely than not followed by a dictatorship. The reason runaway inflations tend to result in dictatorships is because the natives become restless when they discover that government’s paper money is worthless.
The classic example of the latter scenario, as Ringer notes, is the infamous instance of Germany’s runaway inflation in 1923:
And waiting in the wings, preparing hysterical answers for hysterical people, was Adolf Hitler, who understood all too well that only an authoritarian police state could restore order.
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Robert Ringer’s WND article.
Robert Ringer’s WND article archive.
Ringer’s book Restoring the American Dream on Amazon.com.