It is part of the fallen nature of Man to seek out a leader to take care of him. This is a corrupted version of what God made each of us with, an innate desire to be lead by God. We all still have this desire, but if we have not been trained up in the Lord, we can easily mistake this desire for that of a leader to protect us.
When the economic events happen which we have been discussing, Man will once again turn towards the government for solutions and protection. This happens time and time again in history. During the Great Depression, we elected FDR to save us and gave him and the Congress basically unlimited power to do whatever they wanted to “protect us”. All this did was make matters worse.
We’ve already talked about the destruction of wealth which the government perpetrated on the American people. Another tactic which they used was the Smoot-Hawley Trade Bill. The idea was to put tariffs on foreign goods so that American companies could better compete and therefore jobs would be saved. America was hurting so it only seemed natural to protect ourselves from outside companies from outside countries.
Of course the actual effects were far more devastating. After we instituted our tariffs, other countries instituted their own. Worldwide trade came to a grinding hault as everyone “protected” their own interests. Instead of their own interests being protected, every country suffered.
Man never learns the lesson of this though, and when times get tough, always looks to a strong leader to protect him from these harmful outside forces even if the thinking behind these strategies doesn’t really make sense. Such a leader appears to be wise and up-beat, ambitious, and charismatic. But he is ready to take advantage of the blindness of the masses and steer them into a ruthless cause, which always ends up in self-destruction. The man himself probably doesn’t know that this is what he is doing, but is so consumed with pride that he thinks all his ways are good. Hitler, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao-Zhedong are all vivid and evident personalities of this type. Surely the evil one is behind these minds and their ideals which lure the people, but the unenlightened heart of the masses, whose god is their appetites as Paul put it, have by their own follies made themselves ready prey. They ultimately are the cause of all this. Like people, like leader.
Actually, we’re already seeing these things. Recently the US instituted a 35% tariff against Chinese tires as part of the “Buy American” stimulus package. Europe has done something similar with a 40% tariff on Chinese steel. The Australians are looking at fresh new laws of corporate ownership which are obviously coming about because of their fear of the Chinese. I personally buy American whenever I can, but I’m against the US setting up tariffs such as the above because of exactly what I mentioned previously. The unintended consequence of these things is always more devastating than the original problem. We haven’t seen China react to this yet, but when things get worse, it would not surprise me to see countries trying this same old trick, and that would be devastating.
Actually many of the world’s countries are currently doing something similar. Just as we are printing dollars as fast as we can to devalue our own currency, many other countries are doing exactly the same thing. It’s a race to see who can make their own citizens the poorest for the sole reason of increasing exports. Who knows how this will all end up. If you decide to move your money out of dollars, be careful where you put them because many other countries are doing exactly what the US is doing with its Dollar.
Tomorrow we’ll take a final look at what the US will look like during and after this Storm.
We just held a free event about this Coming Storm and how to prepare for it in Austin. If you would like more ideas on how to prepare for this coming storm, please sign up for our free newsletter here. Through it, we plan to make the recording of this event available soon as well as let you know about future events. If you’d like to read more about the spiritual realities behind what’s happening, read the series we just finished on Daniel.
This post is Part 12 in the series Financial Outlook of the United States. To gain more insight, you can read about the coming storm here, in Pt 1, Pt 2, Pt 3, Pt 4, Pt 5, Pt 6, Pt 7, Pt 8, Pt 9, Pt 10 and Pt 11.
Photo credit: SunshineBabe_US