Progressives don't want you to read real history. But in order to get out of the mess we are currently in, it's imperative to understand how we got here.
Join me on another one of my "designed just to get TV ratings" history lessons?
Back when we were growing up — after the World Wars — people were freaking out about nuclear weapons. Who wouldn't be? We'd stay up at night hoping the Soviets wouldn't vaporize us.
So some scientists came up with an idea to protect us: The Doomsday Device. They wanted to put a series of data into a computer and create programs that would calculate the risk of a country launching a nuclear attack. The computer would be attached to a stockpile of nuclear weapons, so that if a country launched an attack, the computer would automatically trigger the super-bomb and bathe the Earth in fire and radiation. They were going to destroy the planet!
I'll go out on a limb and say this theory has a few holes in it. What if the computer had a glitch or what if some suicidal computer hacker wanted to take the rest of the world out along with him?
The world would eventually settle on "mutually assured destruction": The idea was if two countries engaged in nuclear attacks, you could bet that both countries would be vaporized. And the very thought of that would stop countries from attacking each other in the first place.
After the 9/11 attacks perpetrated by Al Qaeda, I started doing my homework. I was a pretty lazy American and decided to educate myself. I read "Tragedy and Hope." It was written in the 1960s by a very well-respected professor — he's taught at Georgetown, Harvard, Princeton — named Carroll Quigley. He was a very close mentor to Bill Clinton; he's advised other presidents.
Quigley had a better idea than the Doomsday Device or mutually assured destruction to prevent nuclear war; tragedy is war, the hope was an end to the wars.
Instead of tying everybody to a master computer, they decided to tie the world's economies together. That way no country would dare wage total war on another without risking the destruction of its own economy. The book came out in the early '60s — can you think of a war since then where there has been a clear winner and loser since then? Vietnam. The Gulf wars. Afghanistan. The War on Terror. They did this to stop wars. Just like it's mutually assured destruction if someone launches a nuclear weapon; this is mutually assured economic destruction.
But fast forward to today — look at what is happening around the globe:
Greece is failing. Economically, their debt is more than twice what Russia owed when it defaulted in 1998. The unrest is about to boil over; they are striking. There have been riots and violent outbursts.
George Soros of all people — a progressive who advocates for E.U.-style policies — acknowledges it's not just Greece in trouble: Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland are also floundering. Of course, Soros' solution is "more intrusive monitoring" — I don't even know what that means, Big Brother.
You've got all of these countries going down in a domino effect. Apparently their economies are all tied together. We're all interdependent — oh yeah, to stop nuclear war, we would tie all of our economies together.
It's why the George Soros-type global master planning idea is horrible: When we're all tied together, when one falls we all fall down. If America falls, the entire world falls. If China falls, the world falls. The Europe falls, the world falls.
That's the reason we hear the phrase "too big to fail," but nobody is explaining it to you. I just have: If these countries go down, it was designed for the entire system to go down.
One person said this clearly, but he acted shocked like he didn't know why it was all happening. Right after TARP and everything else, one congressman said this:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. PAUL KANJORSKI, D-PA: If they had not done that, their estimation was that by 2 o'clock that afternoon, $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money market system of the United States, would have collapsed the entire economy of the United States and, within 24 hours, the world economy would have collapsed. Now we talked at that time about what would happen if that happened. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
So now we have to decide can we save things like the banks or Greece? I don't think we can; others do. But the question is: Should we save them? Knowing what I just told you, it's designed to collapse the whole thing. Should we save them? Your gut instinct is yes, of course. But let me introduce you to someone. He's an economist you've probably never heard of because he was practically erased from the history books. He was Russian. His name was Nikolai Kondratiev.
Kondratiev is credited with popularizing the "Wave Theory" on capitalism in his 1925 book, "The Major Economic Cycles."
Basically the "Wave Theory" holds that capitalism has a consistent pattern of ups and downs. These long waves averaged about 40-60 years, cycling between economic winter (think, the Great Depression), spring (things are turning around), summer (when we can do no wrong) and fall (when the economic leaves start to turn).
We are not allowing these natural dips to happen. I'm telling you, the argument is coming in the near future: Capitalism isn't working, we need something else. But the problem with that argument is we are not a capitalist country anymore. We continue to prop things up and not allow the system to clear out. What is so free about a government that takes over car companies, banks and health care? And controlling prices? And capping salaries? Is that free?
The paradigm is about to shift and the old think — the old fixes — won't work anymore. Everyone seems to know it, except for us here in America. China gets it. They know a massive transformation is about to happen and they are excited for it. The Obama administration knows it too. Radical progressives know it. This is their moment of opportunity and they too are excited.
The only way to survive this is to think out of the box.
While the Europe and the rest of the world crater, money will look for places to go. If we have low taxes, minimum regulation, maximum freedom, money from all over the world will leave the burning economies of the world and rush to the safe havens of America. We can get the best minds and the best capital and re-invent the world of tomorrow, if we are stable, with minimal government intrusion and economic incentives for people to come here.
But right now we are headed exactly the wrong way.
We've got to be the thinkers we once were: The innovators who perfected the assembly line and discovered vaccines. The kind of people who didn't throw their hands up in the air when the crew on Apollo 13 announced, "Houston, we have a problem." Those astronauts almost didn't make it back. They had to take things and use them in a way they weren't meant to be used, just to get them home. They made the impossible, possible.
That's who we are. But we have to roll up our sleeves, think out of the box and innovate our way out of this mess.
— Watch "Glenn Beck" weekdays at 5 p.m. ET on Fox News Channel
Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox