The Page 69 Test: "The New Golden Age"

Ravi Batra is the author of Greenspan's Fraud as well as the international bestsellers as The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism, The Great Depression of 1990, and The Myth of Free Trade. He is professor of economics at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

He applied the "page 69 test" to his new book, The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos, and reported the following:

My latest work, The New Golden Age, is partly based on my past writings, especially those in the 1970s, when I wrote two books in which I made the following forecasts:

* The ayatollahs would take over Iran in 1979 and then rule for a while.
* The Soviet Communism would vanish by the end of the century.
* The United States would be entangled in a major fight with fundamentalist Islam starting around 2000.

Because of the far-fetched nature of these forecasts, my books, one entitled, The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism, and the other called, Muslim Civilization, attracted little attention. By now these forecasts have come true, and my new book, The New Golden Age, predicts that monopoly capitalism is next to fall.

I base my forecasts on economic and historical cycles. According to an economic cycle we are currently in the midst of an inflationary decade with a high and rising price of oil. My historical cycle concludes that the age of acquisitors, where money rules society, is about to end in America and Europe. This cycle also predicts that China, where the rule of money or of wealthy feudalist landlords ended in 1949, is about to move into its own golden age. History reveals that the age of the wealthy always ends in a social revolution followed by a golden age.

The single most worrisome global economic problem today is the U.S. housing bubble that has been primarily financed by foreign money. When the American bubble bursts by mid-2007 and continues to splinter thereafter, foreign investors will head for the exits; while it is in the self-interest of foreign governments to finance the U.S. trade deficit, private groups have no such interest or obligation. The bursting of the U.S. bubble will result in loan defaults and could start a foreign stampede out of American assets, leading to a collapse of the dollar, which in turn will cause American stock, bond, and real estate markets to crash by 2010, the year the revolution is likely to begin in America. That will then have a ripple effect around the world.

Some excerpts from pages 69 and 70.

“In spite of major differences in their inherent qualities, all classes make roughly equal contributions to the well-being of society. Without the warriors there would be no law and order, without the intellectuals there would be no conceptualization of human rights, liberty and justice, without acquisitors the economy would be in a poor state and without laborers there would not be much production. Every good person is crucial to social welfare, and every bad person is ultimately a societal parasite regardless of their innate qualities and achievements.

Once certain intellectuals discover that hoarding money and starting a business are keys to social prestige and political influence, they quickly learn the art of entrepreneurship from the acquisitors, and with their superior intellect eventually come to dominate the arteries of government. That is when the engine of exploitation runs full speed. This is because the intellectual acquisitor combines in one brain the cunning of the bad intellectual and the greed of the acquisitor.

Social Revolution

The salient feature of the era of intellectual acquisitors is that the ruling elite amass wealth but make people believe that such an endeavor is good for society. For instance, they cut taxes for themselves while raising taxes for other classes, and yet are able to convince the public that such economic policies are in society’s best interest. Or they may persuade you that God has blessed them with opulence so that they can take care of the indigent. They have the intellect to make you feel better even as they hit you, at least for a while. Dogmas proliferate at this point, and the laborer bears the maximum burden of exploitation.

Once the majority of intellectuals become acquisitive, materialism degenerates into super-materialism. There are no more religious or ethical restraints on the avarice of the elite, and as the public follows its leaders, everything gets commercialized.

There comes a point when intellectual acquisitors are virtually unchallenged; that's when the process of wealth concentration runs full throttle, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer at incredible speeds. The boundless greed and hypocrisy of acquisitive intellectuals ultimately torments the majority of people. Salaries go down, and the bulk of society is forced to devote much of its time to making money. Warriors and intellectuals then have to become laborers because they have little time left for the finer pursuits of life. They have to labor hard to support themselves and their children. The intellectual’s inherent love for art, music, painting and philosophy gives way to routine work all day long to provide the means for family survival. The warrior’s innate predilection for adventure and sport is replaced by overtime work to make ends meet. The vast majority of society comes to adopt the laborers’ way of living and thinking.

[At times such as these, people overthrow the rule of money in society, as they did during Feudalism in Europe. Then comes a golden age.]”