Herbert W Armstrong

   And greeting friends around the world, news you hear in this world today is not usually very good. And whether you're talking about the presidential election year and the millions of wavering voters wondering what's going to happen in the economy in 1977 or at the nuclear arms race, the Middle East festooned with all kinds of weapons, the constant trend and the problem in this world of too many people and not enough food. It's about time we wondered what is going to happen in the next decade, 15-20 years from now, around the turn of the next century.

   And can we be sure we will be living in a world of peace even a few months from now? Well, judging by the rapidity with which things have happened and developed in the world in the past few years, there is no way by which you can know on any given morning. You get up and look at the newspaper or turn on your daily television news, whether or not mankind is now in the grips of some new modern peril, whether or not a new Arab oil embargo has come along. That war has broken out in yet another part of the world. Perhaps South Africa, a Middle Eastern Persian Gulf oil state, South Korea or other trouble spots of the world. You cannot know in any given period of time. Exactly what the future will bring.

   Well, is there any way then for you to understand and look into the future to find out what might happen to have any sense of security? Any sense of peace of mind, any real grasp of world affairs? To wonder whether or not it makes any sense in this world to plan to send kids to school and plan to send them on to college later on to look at the, at the marriage plans of a son or a daughter to think about grandchildren, to think about buying a piece of property, to think about retiring or settling down, to think about moving from one place to another, think about getting a different kind of a job or a new profession. How do you really plan with all the conflict in this world for the future when the future seems to be so insecure and so uncertain?

   Well, that question of course, is one of the modern dilemmas that confronts millions upon millions of people, not the least of whom are those people living in that affluent part of the western world of the United States and Western Europe who have never had it quite so good and yet who continually talk about how very bad things are.

   I imagine that if you could know the future you wouldn't want to. I imagine if you could know exactly what the outcome of today's current world conditions will be in 3, 5, 9, 10 years that you wouldn't really want to know the attitude of most people seems to be. Don't tell me the bad news. I'm tired of hearing all the problems of the world. There's no reason to worry. Nothing's gonna turn out all right anyway, so let me just enjoy the pleasures for the moment. Let me think about sports, football, boxing, boating, sailing, skiing, swimming something and don't bug me with all the problems abroad.

   Americans in this election year are far more concerned about the food on the table, the taxes, elderly people on fixed incomes, joblessness, crime in the streets. They are far more concerned in other words about themselves than they are about the Middle East arms race about Europe's political dwarf growing up about the super giant of industry that is Japan about the very, very insecure flow of vital strategic materials from the Arabs to American filling station pumps. They're far more concerned about the little things that confront us on a day-to-day basis than they are about those broad geopolitical overviews that really do affect the course of all of humanity.

   And so each presidential candidate has been spending a lot more time talking about whether or not they care for the people, talking about the little people, the poor people, the people out of a job, the people who hurt and ache who need a tooth pulled or a cancer removed than they are about the international global world conditions that have to do with the entire future of all of humankind.

   We have never lived in the history of mankind in a more dangerous period of history. We have never lived in a time where the potential for global annihilation to the combined forces of nuclear war of war by accident, by the way, of biological or chemical warfare, of warfare which would destroy even existing areas, much of them, of productivity that are dwindling so rapidly in the food versus famine curve where already there are far too many human beings on this planet and arable and productive and fertile ground is disappearing at a tremendous and alarming rate rather than being gradually opened up.

   That's another of the great myths that many people like to believe in. And so, in the midst of all of this people really would rather just shove it out of their minds. They would rather think of something else. And so we think of the pleasures for the moment and instead of asking about the future and wondering about the next 10 years, 20 years and really planning in any definitive sense. For a secure and a peaceful world. We, we tend to simply avoid looking at it. We play a little game of, of hide our eyes from reality because reality is unacceptable and go seek our personal pleasures.

   Well, where are world events taking mankind? What's wrong with this world today? We know there's too much famine. We know there isn't enough food. We know there is too much poverty. We know that out of every five human individuals, four of them live under totalitarianism and do not live in a free condition. And even those in the so-called free nations are finding their freedoms gradually eroding away from them and being taken away. Racial conflict boils in South Africa. Developing nations. That's a nice polite word for impoverished, hungry, disease-ridden, squalid nations that bear little resemblance to anything you could even call modern civilization, but they call them developing nations. They angrily confront the developed nations.

   A person like Idi Amin, who is a ham-fisted, iron-fisted dictator over a nation of impoverished people who sends his troops in to wipe out a university because of a son who was spurned by girls whose advances, uh the son of course had rejected. And so, we find that a man like that still has the gall to cry out in some righteous indignation against what is happening in South Africa. Yet here is a black minority ruling in heartless dictatorship by the muzzle of the gun over a huge black majority, it is a minority government, by the way.

   Then of course, there's the big superpower rivalry of the world, the international arms race in which the United States is a leading trafficker, the population food squeeze world on a treadmill of economic crises, social problems, unemployment, crime, and unrest and the major false belief we have is that government is able to solve the problem. Millions of us believe in the promises of a leader to lead us out of all these problems. Millions of people believe that a president of the United States is able to stop inflation. A president is able to give you a job. A president is able to stop crime. It is only a matter of either having the intelligence or having the will and the desire of having the right people around him, of having a congress that is able to work with him instead of against whatever it is you think there are millions who believe in that absolute myth that a president is able to solve the problems, but a president is not able to solve the problems.

   And as I've said for so many years from one presidential election after another and the words have been borne out every single time, whether you go back to Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Johnson Johnson, and then Nixon or Presciently Ford and the next president that the new president finds himself always propelled and pushed along by forces which have been set in motion long prior to his inauguration over which he has absolutely no control at all.

   Well, I met Henry Kissinger in Dallas and subsequently listened to his talk about the foreign policy procedures which had been taken by an administration long prior to the current one. And of those decisions which had shaped the world in our post-war nuclear arms race for so many decades where he was trying to get across, at least as a part of that point, the fact that in the area of foreign policy decisions which were made in defense spending such as deployment of our Minuteman missile system or deployment of the ABM system or deployment of the Poseidon submarine weapon that we, we have aboard our nuclear-carrying submarines, which is a IRBM missile with a nuclear warhead had been so far-reaching and have committed the nation to certain defense expenditures and certain programs in our national budget that even though a new president might come along, the industry cranking out the arms, the industry cranking out the missiles of the nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers or the bombers or what have you was so already molded, so fixed and so attuned to those policies which have been set that even if the new administration came along, it was utterly powerless to change them.

   Now, people want change, but they want change now. If a person is hungry, he wants to eat, now. If a person doesn't have a job, he wants to go to work today or tomorrow, we tend to demand instant solutions to problems which took years to gradually grow. And we don't seem to realize that presidents can't change things quickly. It is too late already for either man to change business trends and to do much at all about what's going to happen through the year of 1977 whatever will be, will be Que Sera, Sera, you can sing it right now no matter whether either man is president or whether we say either man who was only a the vice president, who is only a heartbeat away from being president, whether, whether Mondale or Dole end up being the president or whether the Speaker of the House, if something happens to one of them, I'm just saying it doesn't matter who the president is throughout the entirety of 1977 and probably well into 78 and 9. There is little, if anything that individual is going to be able to do to change what has already been set in motion, the economic policies of government are such that the basic trends in the economy have already been predetermined.

   Now, it may have been different back a few years ago where a president had a little more power. But you know, in recent times, the various bureaucrats and the various policies of Congress and new legislation and so on have pretty much sealed off the various avenues that the president had for stimulating the economy.

   You might have been able to send a lot of money into various governmental projects, build some more dams and subsidize some railways and build some roadways and maybe strengthen the armed services and maybe spend in defense budgets and so on and try to provide a lot of jobs. But there isn't all that much room to do anything about it one way or the other. A president in the past might have been able to persuade the Congress whether they were reluctant or not to spend a lot of more money on, on various of these domestic projects, building roads, Interstates and what have you.

   But the next president is going to find that that is very, very difficult to do if not impossible. An obstacle at the very beginning of all this is that any spending changes in the next year or so can only really be approved by Congress. The president can't get in there and wave a magic wand and suddenly create a lot of additional jobs and all of that budget making that, that labyrinth of, of those committees and that budget making machinery.

   The whole decision, the whole process of bringing that about is so technical and so finely tuned and so involved that it will virtually be impossible for the new president to do anything about it one way or the other.

   Let's suppose that the new president true to whatever plans you might have in mind. And certainly you can't accuse either man of wanting to destroy the economy. All you can do is to accuse one or the other of them. I guess whoever your choice is of being naive or of uh not really genuinely knowing what the problem is or not understanding how to do it or whatever voters think about presidential candidates. But you can't accuse them of being sincerely non-desirous of wanting to help the little people.

   Some little people say, I don't think he's for the little people, other people, I think he is the little people. Well, fine. You can think whatever you want to. But let's suppose he decides to try to boost spending and that even in this case, no matter who wins, Congress decides to ok it and to go along with it then what happens?

   Well, I'll tell you what, there aren't very many programs in all of this federal bureaucracy that are equipped to expand rapidly. It's just that simple. It is all locked in by current legislation and by the very nature of various government bureaus and so on that you can't get that money flowing through those bureaus out into those programs rapidly enough to make any effect whatsoever in probably six months or more.

   And when people are hungry now they want a job now, six months later, it means they're totally wiped out. It doesn't mean that they've got the relief when they need it, it isn't really as easy to lower taxes as a lot of people think. And as both candidates tend to promise. Now, there were some real serious tax chains. That's another thing and effect of the new tax bill, by the way would be that there's going to be an awful lot of additional confusion over how to interpret it.

   So it's going to take another ream of documents and host of lawyers to try to interpret the new tax bill. And by the time you and I figure out how to make out our income tax return the next April or so you're gonna need about three or four additional lawyers probably. And it's gonna throw all, all the various agencies who help you with your income tax into a kind of a turmoil just to figure out what the present new tax bill is.

   And if we've got a new president comes along and says he wants to change that again, you can't even begin to imagine the kind of chaos there will be by the end of the fiscal year. Well, you know, the federal budget probably isn't going to change much. So even if spending could change, which it won't, at least not rapidly or tax changes could be made quickly, which they won't, at least, not quickly, they will probably have little or no impact in the middle of 1977 and beyond. So, you need to understand that, no matter who is elected in the White House, there won't be very much change in 1977 and maybe not on over into 1978. Whatever they can do is going to be almost minimal no matter which man is elected because that is the way of things in our vast system of federal government.

   The American Mountain of debt on its way to $3 trillion the ballooning government debt and the public and private debt of the United States and the attitude of most people toward our affluence toward money toward the fact that we representing only about 6% of the population of the world are wallowing around in 50% of its wealth and crying that we're too poor and that we need an awful lot more of practically everything.

   You try to assess what the future is going to be like. And looking at a presidential election to me is a microcosm of looking at man facing the future in all of the nations of the world. We all want pretty much the same things whether we are Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Ukrainian, American, Polish British, or what we want more. We want peace, happiness, joy, excitement, entertainment, leisure time, pleasures.

   Of course, we want food, clothing and shelter that comes first. But after that, we want luxury and we want all of the fine things in life and none of the aches and pains and problems. And we tend now to look to government to provide those things instead of looking to ourselves or to God.

   People now begin to believe that government can provide, but only God has been able to promise. God anciently when he appeared to Israel and called them out of slavery and made them into his own nation, said that only he was able to provide peace in the land, rest from their enemies from without an absence of military conscription, heavy taxation and national debt. That only he was able to provide rain in due season and good crops. To the point that the man with the plow would overtake the man with a threshing machine barely be able to get the crop out of the field when it was time to plow it again, God could provide that he could provide healthy happy babies, long life. In other words, Medicare and Medicaid, except far more effectively, he could provide all of those things.

   But now we want government to provide all those things government really had to do in its more idealistic sense back in the old days in the United States with providing those services that the average community had need of even beyond a community system of government, whether a city manager, a mayor, a town council or what have you and even beyond the state organization of government, so that we had interstate commerce, we had various governmental agencies for the collection of taxes and the collection of duties and customs. We have various government, police organizations. And we have our three basic branches of government.

   But now government has branched out like an all-powerful leaching octopus to strangle most state governments to move clear down into the county and the local area to almost everywhere, you turn almost everything you buy, almost everything you do. The federal government is in some way involved, local people making local decisions about how they want their local community to be run apart from and aside from some federal governmental regulation is virtually unheard of and is practically impossible today, whether you're talking of gun control ideas, whether you're talking about abortion, whether you're talking about everything, I suppose, from high-rise buildings to stop signs, you're going to find that the federal government sooner or later has got some kind of a law that is going to, to arbitrate legislate or decide for a local community and a private citizen exactly how he shall conduct his life.

   But we are finding now, that federal government is desperately trying to provide people with what they have been crying for. People seem to want others to make their decisions for them. They want others to guarantee a cradle-to-the-grave, happy, prosperous life free from worry and from fear. So, if their boss on the job won't promise them a guaranteed minimum wage, they want the federal government to do it. If their boss doesn't give them a good pension plan, they want the federal government to do it. If the boss won't guarantee them a national funded federal health insurance program, they turn to the government for that, if they can't get the boss to give them a guaranteed four-day workweek, a three-week or better yet, a three-month, if that's possible. A vacation. Well, they'd like the federal government to step in and force the boss to do it.

   So, we turn to the federal government and then we turn around in bewilderment and wonder why in the world government is so big. We argue that we don't like big government. We like small government. But on the other hand, we argue that we want federal government to do everything, dam the river and produce hydroelectric energy or don't dam the river in spirit because we know that the ecologists claim it's going to impact the environment adversely. It's gonna drown a lot of old homestead cabins and Indian hieroglyphics and nobody can agree on that. And so, we want a federal government agency to make the final decision maybe. And even then when it's made, not everybody's ever going to agree with it.

   Oh, I, I don't know. As, as we look at the, at the future and at people's attitudes toward the future and toward what people are asking of government, it begins to appear to me that people are almost demanding of their leaders that they become a pack of hypocrites because people are beginning to demand of federal leaders and of governors, people in positions of power or authority that they want things which those people are unable to provide. And so that leads them to promise the people things they are unable to provide. You're not gonna find a candidate saying, look, it doesn't really matter who you elect this year. There's probably nothing we can do about business anyway. And yet those are the facts. That is exactly what is going to come to pass. You mark my words, that's what everybody's gonna write, what they're going to say. And that's what the appraisal is going to be midway through 1977.

   No matter whether Jimmy Carter is the president or Jerald Ford is the president. What either man is able to do in the course of the next few months is going to be absolutely inconsequential so far as helping in some way to give you some economic good news. All of that is already decided. And that really is up to people who are putting shakes on roofs in New Jersey, up to people who are obtaining mortgages to build a house in Missoula, Montana. That's up to realtors and land speculators in California. That's up to the farmers of Ohio and Nebraska, that's up to the sheep and cattle ranchers of Colorado, that's up to the miners over in Pennsylvania and to the oil men of Texas and to the housewives of Oregon and to the people who are buying automobiles in Detroit. It is not really up to federal government because it's all pretty well decided.

   Now we all know where the unions stand. And it's been argued that federal programs designed to subsidize a lot of these things make it easier for average individuals to boost the income. Really is not going to do very much good either. The federal government can order those printing presses there to print overtime, but they're doing that already to print a lot of worthless money to put more money in circulation, chasing fewer goods, which we've already got, which is what inflation is all about. And that's still not going to make us happy because when the balloon burst and the shuddering readjustments to the economy occur, then additional millions are going to be out of work.

   Now, you know, you could look around in your own local area and you could probably find something to do. I read too many cases of people who have turned down jobs. I mean, jobs, I mean, where they work now, maybe they weren't positions. You didn't have your feet on the desk. No, you were bussing dishes in a, in Joe's, uh, greasy spoon or Dirty Eddie's. That's true. Maybe you were driving a hack or a truck. Maybe you were working on a shovel with a road gang. I don't know. But a lot of people have turned down jobs because they couldn't make as much on the job as they could by lining up in the unemployment line for their check. And that's fact, we've already got a situation where there is an incentive for people to remain out of work by the unemployment check they can receive.

   And I remember one long-haired creepy character bragging to me, he was waiting on me and I was almost ready to demand that he wear a hair net because he working in a restaurant and talking about how he just got part-time jobs, never declared his income that way if he couldn't keep a job for more than a week or so, the federal government never got any money in taxes. And he just frittered around from one job to the other. And in the meantime, faithfully, he showed up to get his unemployment check, but he was doing part-time jobs, having two and three part-time jobs a day for that matter and working at nights too. A lot of guys are playing that angle. It just as evil just as dirty and just as illegal as any crook robbing a bank. But at the same time, those are the same types of characters that are probably gonna be found sitting in a public square down here with an anti-government sign, tear down the government. We're against the government. We hate the government. We hate the establishment but they sure will line up faithfully to get that unemployment check.

   Well, we don't seem to realize that we are looking to man's government, to human beings to do for us, what cannot ever be done for us and that we believe in an extraordinary number of myths, none of which are true.

   We, in this Western Civilization are living in a time which is not a bit unlike that of Ancient Rome. We're in a time of a crisis of the human spirit, the time of the disappearance of those values and those standards which some people like to call the work ethic. A time where good, hard, honest work for a good honest day's wage, where thrift and integrity for honesty and justice are words which are simply empty words on a piece of paper someplace. But they don't really apply to us as a principle of character by which we feel we ought to live.

   And so, we are in a crisis of government, a crisis of leadership and a crisis of the spirit. It is true that he is governed best, who is governed least because he is governed best who is the most self-governed.

   But if we live in a society whereby crime and criminal activity, whereby voracious greed, we continue to fuel the ever upward spiraling inflationary cycle in which we find ourselves hopelessly lost. If we continue to overspend beyond our means to gripe about the number of hours, we work and working conditions to want more benefits, more pay, less work, more leisure, more goods, more services, more time off a shorter work week, guaranteed minimum wages, a feather bedded society, a posh, plush affluence where all we've got to do is lie there and let the Proverb and Nubian slave fan our fevered brow and the dancing girls skip lightly across our vision as we urp a beer on our silken Persian prayer rugs and pillows. I suppose we will never learn the lesson of why we've got the national problems we have.

   But above all things, we have a crisis of the spirit and a crisis of religion because we've lost character because we're experiencing what I've called the character grain in the United States. There's a way to stop it. There's a way to get off of that drain and get back on to some meaningful values, some meaningful principles that are spiritual in nature. If we don't just crack the pages of our Bible and look it up and find out what life ought to be about how we ought to be living, what are the laws and principles that regulate the kind of society that we really want?

   Well, if you want to find out where we're headed right now, you've got to take a look at this overview of our civilization in the light of what that ancient civilization of Rome was once like, because did you know that the people in Rome were crying out for the same kind of government? The same kind of relief? They had the same problem in defense expenditures in pollution, in divorce and crime in environmental controls and problems. They had the same problems of affluence, the same problems of decadence and of, of all of the experience of that time and the collapse of that home of the disintegration of religion and even older marriages breaking up during the time of the collapse of that ancient empire as we've got today. And they wanted the same solutions. They wanted strong leadership to take them out of it, but they looked to the wrong direction and Rome fell.

   If you want to dial at toll-free number 800 423-4444. We'll send you this free booklet. The Modern Romans, that's talking about us. The Modern Romans. 800-423-4444 or you can write to me Garner Ted Armstrong Pasadena, California for your free copy. Until next time. This is Garner Ted Armstrong saying goodbye friends.

   You have heard the World Tomorrow with Garner Ted Armstrong sponsored by the Worldwide Church of God for literature offered on this program, send your requests along with the call letters of this station to Garner Ted Armstrong Pasadena, California 91123. Or you may dial this toll-free number 800-423-4444.