The Great Withdrawal Also by Craig R. Smith Rediscovering Gold in the 21st Century: The Complete Guide to the Next Gold Rush Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil (co-authored with Jerome R. Corsi) The Uses of Inflation: Monetary Policy and Governance in the 21st Century Crashing the Dollar: How to Survive a Global Currency Collapse (co-authored with Lowell Ponte) Re-Making Money: Ways to Restore America’s Optimistic Golden Age (co-authored with Lowell Ponte) The Inflation Deception: Six Ways Government Tricks Us...And Seven Ways to Stop It! (co-authored with Lowell Ponte) The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America’s Money Back (co-authored with Lowell Ponte) Also by Lowell Ponte The Cooling Crashing the Dollar: How to Survive a Global Currency Collapse (co-authored with Craig R. Smith) Re-Making Money: Ways to Restore America’s Optimistic Golden Age (co-authored with Craig R. Smith) The Inflation Deception: Six Ways Government Tricks Us...And Seven Ways to Stop It! (co-authored with Craig R. Smith) The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America’s Money Back (co-authored with Craig R. Smith) The Great Withdrawal How the Progressives’ 100-Year Debasement of America and the Dollar Ends by Craig R. Smith and Lowell Ponte Foreword by Pat Boone Idea Factory Press Phoenix, Arizona The Great Withdrawal How the Progressives’ 100-Year Debasement of America and the Dollar Ends Copyright © 2013 by Idea Factory Press All Rights Reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or parts thereof, in any form except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. Printed in the United States of America. For more information contact publisher. Dustin D. Brown, Krypticeeye.com Editing by Ellen L. Ponte Portions of this book originally appeared in the following projects by Craig R. Smith and Lowell Ponte: The Inflation Deception: Six Ways Government Tricks Us...And Seven Ways to Stop It! and The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America’s Money Back and Why Cyprus Matters: Could Politicians Loot Your Life Savings Account As They Did In Cyprus? They Already Have and Have Plans to Take It All. A Savings Survival Guide. Copyright © 2011, 2012 and 2013 by Idea Factory Press. All Rights Reserved. Portions of this book originally appeared in The Uses of Inflation: Monetary Policy and Governance in the 21st Century by Craig R. Smith Copyright © 2011 by Swiss America Trading Corporation All Rights Reserved. Library of Congress Data ISBN Number 978-0-9898471-0-0 First Edition - October 2013 Idea Factory Press 2725 E. Mine Creek Road, #1028, Phoenix, AZ 85024 Tel. (602) 918-3296 * [email protected] Updates, reviews and more are posted at http://greatwithdrawal.com Table of Contents Foreword by Pat Boone ..................................................................... vii Introduction by Craig R. Smith ................................................................9 PART ONE – Progressivism’s Rise and Fall Chapter One – Welcome to Debtroit ......................................................15 Chapter Two – Spinning Our Wheels in Quicksand ................................ 45 Chapter Three – The 100-Year Detour .....................................................67 PART TWO – Progressive Control Chapter Four – Addictionomics ..............................................................111 Chapter Five – The Herd Inside Our Heads ...........................................123 Chapter Six – Financial Repression ...................................................... 143 PART THREE – There Can Be Only One Chapter Seven – Progressive Power Grab ............................................ 175 Chapter Eight – The Great Withdrawal ................................................. 197 Epilogue: A Roadmap Home ................................................................. 221 Footnotes ............................................................................................... 225 Sources .................................................................................................. 239 Dedication To my wonderful wife and best friend Melissa Smith, who makes me better each day and raised our daughters Holly and Katie to love the Lord with all their hearts. Also to my Pastor Tommy Barnett, who taught me that doing the right thing is always the right thing to do, and to always hold onto the vision. Foreword by Pat Boone “Now we command you, brethren... that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly...” – 2 Thessalonians 3:6 (KJV) The Framers of America’s Constitution put America on a straight highway into the future based on sound money, small government and individual integrity and faith. So long as America kept faith with this standard, between the 1820s and the creation of the Federal Reserve Board in 1913, the purchasing power of our dollar over that time actually increased in value. American prosper- ity grew in part from keeping our money an honest medium of exchange and a store of reliable value trusted around the world. In 1913 America began “The Great Debasement” of our currency, the turn from gold to today’s Federal Reserve paper fiat money and confiscatory Progressive taxation. In less than a century the buying power of our paper dollar has dwindled to only two cents of its 1913 value, and our economy and society seem stuck and sinking in quicksand. In this book my long-trusted friend and advisor Craig Smith and former Reader’s Digest Roving Editor Lowell Ponte explain how this happened, and why millions of Americans and others around the world have begun a Great Withdrawal from the failed collectivist movement that has debased our values, society, politics, culture and currency. Craig and Lowell show how this Great Withdrawal can bring an end to the failed Progressive utopian rule that has taken America on a 100-year detour away from the path of faith and freedom charted by our Framers. They map how, together and individually, we can return to America’s higher road. In his 1835 book Democracy in America, the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville imagined a future America in which our voluntary associations had died: “I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men.... Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others; his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone.... “Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. “It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood.... “Thus...the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; “It does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which government is the shepherd.” [1] Introduction by Craig R. Smith I came to see the end of the world!” – German tourist in today’s Detroit [2] Two dreams could be dying in the bankrupt city of Detroit, Michigan and in the rest of America and the Western world. One is an American dream of freedom that this Motor City in its heyday put on wheels and decked out in chrome, a dream that inspired the world. The other is the collectivist dream variously known as liberalism, social- ism or Progressivism. Leftists expected that their dominance in Detroit would demonstrate to the world collectivism’s success. Instead, Detroit has become a scientific test proving that Progressivism’s utopian ideas produce terrible results and are unworkable. In the end there can be only one. Either we successfully reboot the original operating system of individual freedom, free enterprise and small government that America’s Framers built into the U.S. Constitution, or the Progressives will by manipulation and force continue to impose their failed collectivist ideas on human- kind’s future. More than 100 years ago, these collectivist ideas began to dominate West- ern civilization. In 1913 they took control of the United States Govern- ment and began a “fundamental transformation” of our economy, politics, culture and beliefs that continues today. Progressives believed that government could, and should, re-make not only the world but also the very nature and society of human beings. They aimed to replace Capitalism, private property, “selfish” individual- ism and God with a human-made Eden, a utopian humanist society where an all-powerful State would equally redistribute the world’s wealth and power to the working class. Detroit became the embodied symbol of this Leftist utopian dream in the United States. Through Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, labor unions seized control of Detroit’s industry, and later its politics, suppos- edly putting the workers in the driver’s seat of history. For a brief moment following World War II, when factories in most of the world’s other industrial nations lay in ruins, Detroit workers had the highest per capita income and rate of home ownership in America – and perhaps in the world. More than three of every 10 civilian American workers during that mo- ment were members of labor unions. The model for this was the com- mand economy of the war, Detroit as the Arsenal of Democracy. A Cold War with the Soviet Union kept alive the spirit of unity and sacrifice Americans felt in facing a common foe. Six decades later, much has changed.