What does Babylon mean - part 3

For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn away from the truth and turn aside to myths. -- 2 Timothy 4:3-4


This week, New York Times financial guru Paul Krugman stated that the recession is almost over. The worst is behind us. GDP -- which stands for Gross Domestic Product: the measure of all the goods and services we produce in case you're new to this -- should start to increase again later in the year. In doing so Krugman added his voice to a growing list of economists who see recovery right around the corner.

Unfortunately it's a lie; a lie based on one of those myths about which Paul warned Timothy. It's also the very heart of the belief system which the Bible refers to as "Babylon".

Here's the myth -- the world economy and standard of living will always grow. It may have it's little ups and downs, but thanks to human ingenuity and knowhow the overall trend line will always be up.

Here's the reality -- our world has a certain amount of resources and no more. Once the limitation of those resources is reached, the limitation on the total amount of goods and services will also have been reached.

And here's the problem -- if our beliefs about the economy don't square with the reality of the situation, we run into one of those dead ends I talked about in the last part. "There is a way that seems right to man, but in the end it leads to...." Remember? Now, if an individual is unrealistic about economic realities he tends to accrue all sorts of debt he can never repay, eventually going into bankruptcy. For an individual, like I said before, it's a tragedy. When every nation on the earth denies reality it becomes a catastrophe. What we are seeing around us right now is the catastrophic destruction of the last century and of half of industrialized living. In a few short years we are going to be faced with hardships that seem unbelievable to us now, growing up the way we did, with all the expectation of comfortable living and even more comfy retirement.

The reason why is simple -- limits. Four years ago we reached the maximum limit on the amount of oil we could extract from the earth. Two years ago we reached the maximum amount of copper and phosphorus. Grain was last year. Coal is coming soon. These are things that our way of life needs the same way a healthy body needs food and water. Without these we stop growing, and since our bodies must replace -- or regrow -- their cells when they wear out, if we stop growing we die.

In the same way, our economy is faced with the imperative, grow or die. You see, most of the money that makes our economy work doesn't actually exist yet. It's an imaginary sum that exists right now in the form of debt. Think of a mortgage on a house. A bank loans someone $200,000 to buy a house. Now, the homebuyer hasn't made the $200,000 yet to pay off the loan, but the bank acts just like they already had. The bank takes the house note and in turn sells it for less than $200,000, and another financial institution buys it, packages it with a bunch of other mortgages, and then sells the whole lot as an investment. These institutions buy, sell, and trade these things just as if they were real money, but they aren't. They are the expectation of a sum of money that hopefully will be made some day in the future. And since the these sums include interest, the overall expectation is that the world economy, its GDP, will keep growing forever and ever.

Traditionally, these interest levels have been in the six to ten percent range. To get an idea for just what it is that the world is expecting, think of it this way: the DOW -- the measure of the 30 largest companies in the United States -- grew by an average of 5.1% from 1901 to 2000. For it to do the same thing for the next 100 years, the Dow would have to rise from its current level of around 9,500 to just over 3,200,000. That's 3.2 million. Over 300 times its current size. Can you even imagine what a company like Walmart would look like if it were 300 times larger than it is right now. There's already a Walmart in every town. What are they going to do? Put 300 Walmarts in every town? Put them in Zimbawe? The Arctic circle? The insanity is mindboggling! And yet, this insanity is at the foundation of our current economic outlook.

If it continued for very much longer, we would see more unemployed people, then employed; we would see row after row of empty strip malls; we would see highways and suburbs overrun with potholes and garbage. But I don't think it's going to continue for very much longer; a few years at the most. The trick is, when a country like the United States, or Russia, or China begins to collapse for lack of assets, their is really only a couple of things they can do. The most obvious one is to seize other countries that have the needed assets. And since countries normally don't like being "seized", that leads us to the next worldwide round of wars. And that leads us to the end times.

Soon, I want to examine the Bible's doomsday clock. The signs for the coming of the great tribulation. The problem is that I don't think it would make sense to very many of you. Not that the signs themselves are difficult -- some are, some aren't. It's that Biblical storytelling itself is so different from the modern variety that going straight to the conclusion of the story without first explaining why the conclusion is, in fact, the conclusion would lead to more head-scratching than anything else. So we need a quick lesson on Biblical storytelling.

That's why the next series is called, why doesn't my life make sense.