They simply ignored the whole event, because to comprehend it would have required accepting truth. And most people hate truth, especially when it threatens to interfere with their daily fix of instant gratification.

Of course, the disappearance of Western civilization was easy to ignore, because it was a quiet revolution. It was, in fact, a moral revolution. And it was the success of that moral revolution that was the real cause of the disappearance of Western civilization.

However, the financial ruin of the U.S. does not equate to the end of time. On the contrary, sober-minded individuals can profit even during bad economic periods. Still, I don’t make flat-out predictions about coming events, because there are far too many intricacies to know precisely what the future holds.

There are five factors that make it impossible to predict the future, and it is these five factors that allow politicians and their sign-pumping cheerleaders to carry on long after the inevitable results of their actions should have already come to pass. Three of these factors have always existed: government guns, government printing presses, and the ignorance of the masses.

The fourth and fifth, however, are relatively new. They are modern technology and virtually unlimited borrowing. So long as a guy can spend more than his already artificially inflated income can buy, he can live in a nice house, drive a new car, and surround himself with electronic gadgets that are the equivalent of Aldous Huxley’s somas in his classic novel Brave New World.

Technology is the politician’s ace in the hole, because, as the late Bennett Cerf, one-time president of Random House Inc., once purportedly said to Nathaniel Brandon, “You have to throw the masses a piece of red meat once in a while or they’ll kill you.” (Let’s call that a paraphrase, because I don’t have quick access to the book — My Years with Ayn Rand — from whence the quote came, but I am confident that my words are pretty close.)

To be sure, the masses do want red meat. Marie Antoinette suggested cake, and discovered that her joke wasn’t appreciated. A lack of red meat also prompted the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. And the masses aren’t averse to rising up against anyone or anything else that threatens to keep them from their red meat.