EXCERPT FROM AMERICA: IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT HER BY DINESH DSOUZA.

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RI GHT 2014 REGENRY PUBLI SHI NG ALL RI GHTS RESERVED. REPRI NTED WI TH PERMI SSI ON.
...America invented something new in the world. There are very few truly world-
changing inventions. Fire is one of them. The wheel is another. The invention of
agriculture is a third. In this book I will show that America is a society based upon
perhaps the most important invention of all time: the invention of wealth
creation. For most of human history, wealth was presumed to be finite. Consider a
boy on the playground with ten marbles. How can he get more marbles? There is
only one way. He has to take someone elses marbles. In the same way, wealth
was mostly in land and the only way to get land was to take it. Conquest, in other
words, was the natural mode of human acquisition. Thats how most countries
were founded, through force and conquest. Slavery and feudal economic
exploitation were simply extensions of the conquest ethic. You get stuff by
grabbing it or, as Abraham Lincoln once put it: You work and I eat.
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Conquest was not merely the way of the world; conquest was seen as a legitimate
way to acquire wealth. It is still seen that way in much of the world. This idea is
hard for us in America to understand. The ethics of conquest are rooted in the
ethics of tribal solidarity. Our tribe is the most worthy of our allegiance, and
therefore its interests are paramount. Our job is to ensure the protection and
welfare of our tribe. Therefore we should attempt to take subjugate other tribes,
before they do the same to us. The ethics of conquest are the ethics of a football
game; we want our team to possess the ball at all times, and we cheer when our
guys knock down and run over the other guys. If we recall the Old Testament, we
see how the victories of Israel over its enemies are considered by the Israelites to
be unambiguously good. Its either them or us, and it may as well be us.

Recognizing that conquest had been the universal ethic, America developed a new
ethic, the ethic of wealth creation. America is founded on the understanding that
wealth can be created through innovation and enterprise. Through the system of
technological capitalism, we can go from ten marbles to twenty marbles without
taking anyones marbles. Obviously there were inventors and merchants around
before America. But America is the first society to be based on invention and
trade. America is the capitalist society par excellence. In this book, I will show
how this new system of wealth creation is fair and just, and how it produces a
better life for little guys in America and around the world. I will not shy away
from addressing the progressive arguments that earning is itself exploitation, that
profits are plunder, and that Americas global actions are a disguised form of
thievery.

I intend to turn the progressive critique on its head. I will demonstrate that the
progressives are the real thieves, in that they use the power of the state to seize the
property and possessions of people who have earned them. In the name of the
ordinary citizen, progressives have declared war on the wealth creators. Yet they
are not on the side of the ordinary citizen, because their policies lead to stagnation,
impoverishment, indebtedness, and declineall in evidence today. It is
progressives who rely on government seizure and bureaucratic conquest to achieve
their goals and increase their power. We work, and they eat. As we shall see, the
progressives have a comprehensive schemeone that relies on deceitto win
political support for their wealth confiscation. Most recently, in order to quell
dissent, the progressives are implementing a chilling policy of national surveillance
and selective prosecutionusing the power of the police to harass and subdue their
opposition. Ultimately what the progressives seek is a suicide of national identity,
a dissolution of the American era. This involves not merely a diminution of
America but a diminution of Americans.

I intend to blow the whistle on these people, starting with Obama and continuing
with Hillary Clinton and the whole progressive menagerie. Once the ordinary
American understands how moral terms have been inverted, and how he is being
conned by his self-styled partisans, he will rise up and repudiate his new
oppressors who are none other than his old oppressors under a new name. America
remains now, as it has long been, a solution to the global problem of scarcity and
the human problem of how to achieve prosperity and happiness. The world needs
America, but only Americans can restore the formula for prosperity and human
flourishing to the benefit of untold millions, here and everywhere, now living or
yet to come.