The Little Book of the Shrinking Dollar: What You Can Do to Protect Your Money Now

The Era of the Sovereign Default Is Now

Uncle Sam, for example, promises to police the world, to feed the jobless, to pay long-term Social Security benefits to retired folks, to provide universal health care for everyone, and to create jobs out of thin air—whether or not those jobs make any economic sense. The list goes on and on. One problem: Uncle Sam can’t pay for any of this stuff unless he takes the money away from someone else.

The power of government relies on the power to confiscate: money, liberty, rights, property, dignity, opportunity, hope. . . . Eventually though, it starts to run out of things to confiscate.

We’re seeing this, real-time, through the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The occupiers, broadly speaking, believe they have already lost most or all of their money, liberty, rights, property, dignity, opportunity, and/or hope. They believe they have little left to lose. More dangerous, they also believe they have much to gain by enlisting the government’s power in redistributing some of the wealth owned by the “1 percent.” The occupiers know that the 1 percent still has something to lose—something that the government could confiscate and send their way.

We don’t foresee an “it’s morning again in America” outcome. Here’s the big problem: An alliance between disgruntled masses and a hostile government is not merely a threat to the 1 percent; it is also a threat to the very foundations of American enterprise. It is a threat to entrepreneurialism, to the pursuit of ...