A Zimbabwe man going to buy a loaf of bread shortly before the currency collapsed. Their money had an expiration date and at the end the 100 Trillion Dollar bill they printed was worth about five U.S. Dollars.
When I started writing The 14th Reinstated in the fall of 2011, I believed it was fiction. It was, of course, one possible scenario for where the United States and the world were headed, but it was a worst possible scenario. A great story, but not such a great world. I meant the story to be entertaining and a bit scary. I also wanted a cautionary tale about the horrors that are possible if we let our guard down. It was meant to be a much bloodier version of Atlas Shrugged. But one of fiction, not fact. Unfortunately it is quickly becoming a prophecy.
Now I am not so sure.
The problem is that Americans are arrogant. We believe we are immune from evil because of our birthright. We don’t think it can touch our soil. Evil happens in other, far-away places, not here. We have become a population who believes that freedom, safety and prosperity just happen by magic, we don’t think about it because we have been conditioned not to. We forget that the reason America stays safe is because of men and women who dedicate their lives to our safety.
The current buzzword is that they are the “sheepdogs” guarding the population of sheep from the evil wolves.
But what happens when the sheepdogs become the predators?
We have had it too easy for too long and now we have come to expect an easy and safe life. It’s our entitlement and we have become a nation addicted to entitlements, a nation of self-centered takers. We think we should have anything we want simply because we want it. We don’t expect to earn anything; it’s all our “right.” We walk around in an iPhone daze, oblivious to our surroundings, lost in our own expectations. As a nation, we are ripe for plucking and it’s just possible that harvest time is starting.
Humor me for a moment as I lay out some thoughts.
The largest obstacle to a world government is the United States of America. We live in a relatively prosperous and free country. It’s not what it once was, but on the world stage we are still at the top. Nobody wants to give that up. Our economy drives the economic prosperity of the world and the Constitution is unique in guaranteeing freedom. Both must be broken to fundamentally change America.
But, if somebody tried to do that in one fell swoop we would become angry, rise up and fight back. So it must be done slowly over years and decades, until at some point we become ready for the next level.
The next level economically would be to devalue our dollar and trash our credit rating. To bring America down from a world leader to a debtor nation with a weak currency, to make us a broken nation and unable to pay our bills.
They could stall the economy by using regulation and increased taxes. Perhaps even force us off a fabricated “fiscal cliff.” They would demonize those who work hard and are successful. They would create class envy; make the lazy hate the ambitious. They could cause the investors to lose faith by changing the rules day to day and punishing success. They would attack the businessmen while strengthening the unions and encouraging them to create stagnation. They would make the future so uncertain that a smart investor will sit on his money rather than put it at risk against a stacked deck.
They could run up record debt and print money until it becomes worthless. Money that no longer has a gold standard, but is fiat currency which is only backed by the “full faith and credit of the United States” insuring its value. The same United States that has seen its credit rating, which has remained perfect for all of history, downgraded twice in recent years. A country that has incurred record debt. Debt that is impossible to pay off, which can only lead to bankruptcy and probably war. They could create a country that is printing money as fast as the presses can run, just as they did in Weimar Germany, or more recently in Zimbabwe. They could drive the currency that was the world standard to a point where “full faith and credit of the United States” insuring its value means nothing.
Why, any sane person would ask, are they printing money at record rates when history has proven without a doubt that it leads only to high inflation and economic collapse?
Why indeed.
Perhaps the most important insurances of freedom are the freedoms to own property and create wealth, the freedom of the press and the only freedom that allows us to protect the others; the right to keep and bear arms.
Regulation and devalued currency can destroy the freedom to own property and build wealth. Should you succeed in spite of the new obstacles, that wealth can be confiscated through taxation. Millionaires and billionaires will be hated by the masses who demand that they are taxed until they are gone.
Freedom of the press is not an important thing if the evil people control the press. Those they don’t control, they can demonize and discredit. The last bastion of the free press, the internet, must be regulated and the United Nations can take it over.
The right to bear arms? A few mass shootings will create enough hysteria to start down the road that begins with “reasonable” gun control and ends with confiscation. Can’t happen here? That’s what they thought in Germany, Russia, China, England, Australia and the list goes on. But again, we Americans are so arrogant and complacent that we really believe we are unique.
We are, actually. Ours is a unique system, designed by geniuses, a system that gives us a chance to vote for new leaders, leaders who may reverse some of these things. Our system of government is meant to be self- correcting.
So, to stop that, they must create a population that is too stupid, too greedy or simply too pre-occupied to know the difference. A voting population that loves their handouts, but doesn’t understand where they come from. One that will wallow in liberal guilt and accept reverse racism as a means to achieve a perceived “payback.” A population that will vote to fill their pockets today rather than for a successful and prosperous nation tomorrow.
Once we have that population they will continue to elect the very people who are causing our destruction and go on with their lives; smug, arrogant and certain that we are somehow immune to the evil things that happen in the rest of the world. We think America will go on forever just as it is.
To think otherwise makes for a great book, but it can never happen here . . . right???.
