The United States of America: The Most Successful Nation and People of All

By Thomas Shipley

This book was developed to present factual information as delineated by the title:
The United States of America
The Most Successful Nation and People of All
…
The 1620 Mayflower Pilgrims Began it, with Freedom for People and the Free Market;
The Constitution Defined It with Law, Success Reigned.
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• Language: English
• Publisher: Stratton Press
• Release date: Feb 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643453552

Book preview

Introduction

I was stimulated to write this one last book by an individual who had written and spoken about this country—its beginnings and its successes. He was a part of a book I had read, A Miracle that Changed the World: The 5000 Year Leap. One comment he made about himself and his ignorance when he first got involved with the author of the book was actually the reason for deciding to write this one. I had scribbled around the subject with a book, Why Government Can Never Fix an Economy , and two booklets, United States Free Market: Different from All Others and Did You Know the Fed Has Been Stealing Your Money? and then I read this and realized our people don’t know how fortunate we have been—to be citizens of the United States of America—and too many of us don’t know that we don’t know.

Steven Pratt wrote,

The dusty old concrete block garage behind a home in Lehi, Utah, was one of those places where my life took a turn forever. A friendly neighbor had invited us to attend a series of lectures titled: The American Heritage and the Constitution. The dialog with the man went something like this:

Him: This is a great class! You will really enjoy it!

Me: I’m too busy.

Him: Every citizen should learn more about their heritage.

Me: How much does it cost?

Him: Only $35, BUT it includes thirty-three hours of classroom instruction and two textbooks.

Me: We can’t possibly afford it.

Him: I will pay the tuition for both you and your wife and will be over at a quarter to seven to pick you up.

It was July of 1974 as we walked beside our host down a worn gravel driveway, past the house, dandelions and cheat grass to the ancient garage out back. The home owner who had volunteered the floor space had moved the ping pong table to set up a few cold steel folding chairs on the bare, oil-stained and cracked concrete floor. It wasn’t much of a classroom; no flashy visual aids, not even a dusty chalk board; hardly a setting for an earthshaking event. Our friend paid the fee and we were each given a copy of the Federalist Papers and a thick three ring binder with the title Constitutional Study Course on the front.

The introduction was brief and our speaker began to teach the lesson: From its earliest beginnings, America was expected to be something great. And not just for Americans but for the whole human family. Our aged teacher went on: Modern Americans seldom speak of it today, but originally this nation was considered the ‘hope of the world.’ With a brief rest pause mid-evening, the presenter spoke for three hours. The evening in the old block garage was a new experience. It was history taught at the feel level.

At the end of the first evening I went up to the old gentleman and said: I don’t know you and you don’t know me, but what do I have to do to teach for you? His cheerful response was, Do your homework!

Please, dear reader, understand that I was considered from the viewpoint of some of my peers to be an educated man. I had a bachelors and a master’s degree from a leading university and had done further graduate studies at another leading university. I had served successfully as a college teacher for six years. I had been raised by good parents in a Christian home. And yet with all that, I realize now that like most other Americans I was completely, totally, functionally illiterate when it came to a working knowledge of the principles and practices of freedom. I had no knowledge that I had no knowledge.

Twelve weeks passed quickly attending classes in the old garage. The course was advertised in another town nearby. I registered and took it again. After about two years in close association with the old professor, one day he said to me, I’m getting too many requests to speak and can’t keep up with them all, would you be willing to accept some of those speaking invitations?

I said, I can’t! Somewhat surprised he asked, Why not? Because I don’t have a suit, I replied. He pulled out his check book and signed a blank check, handed it to me and said, Go and buy the suit of your choice and come to work.

For the next seven years I did research, traveled from coast to coast and taught literally hundreds of classes called, The Miracle of America. In my former employment I had served as a corporate pilot. This skill was immediately put to use when a supporter gave us full unlimited use of two excellent aircraft. The old professor had unbelievable stamina and an iron will. We often taught five nights a week in scattered cities and did research during the day. I remember returning one night after teaching in two cities in southern Idaho. When we taxied the aircraft to parking at Salt Lake International Airport and shut the engines down at 2:00 a.m. my dear old friend turned to me and in a strong voice said, It’s good to be your missionary companion! And that is just what it was for my aged mentor, a mission to teach as many people as possible the GREAT IDEAS THAT CAN CHANGE THE WORLD.

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The first book he completed after I joined the team was this book, The Five Thousand Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World, (fifteenth printing, 2009, by W. Cleon Skousen, published by the National Center for Constitutional Studies). One of the very memorable research assignments was the day he called me into the office and said, Find out everything you can about what Thomas Jefferson meant when he wrote of the ‘Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God’ in the Declaration of Independence. Between teaching assignments, during the coming months I read all the references on the topic in two major law libraries and submitted a single-spaced type-written report of about 170 pages. With the guidance of this marvelous teacher, I was beginning to recognize the nuggets of knowledge that could change the world. The old professor had redirected the course of my life.

Now I am the same age as he was when we first crunched through the gravel past the dandelions and cheat grass to sit on the cold steel chairs in the dusty old concrete block garage. Today younger faces look up into mine and their eyes say, we love you, we trust you, and what should we do? When I search my heart I must reply, that before answering what should we do? we must confront our history and determine from whence we came. What are the principles that allowed us to become the greatest free nation in the history of the world? A good beginning to launch this discovery can be found in the following pages.

The suit my dear mentor gave me grew old and thin in his service. I started saving it for special occasions and finally hung it in a suit bag in the back of the closet. Other suits came and went. Years past. I was scheduled to make a major presentation in the Old St. George Tabernacle on January 13, 2006. Word came that my dear friend and mentor had passed away. The funeral was to be held on January 14th. And so, in honor of Dr. W. Cleon Skousen, I donned the old suit once again to teach the GREAT IDEAS that produced the miracle of America.

Stephen Pratt

Student

This was an excerpt from the foreword to the book just mentioned; I picked that for this book because of one paragraph:

Please, dear reader, understand that I was considered from the viewpoint of some of my peers to be an educated man. I had a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from a leading university and had done further graduate studies at another leading university. I had served successfully as a college teacher for six years. I had been raised by good parents in a Christian home. And yet with all that, I realize now that like most other Americans I was completely, totally, functionally illiterate when it came to a working knowledge of the principles and practices of freedom. I had no knowledge that I had no knowledge.

And, in addition to Mr. Skousen’s book, if you agree with Mr. Pratt and need to further your knowledge, Hillsdale College has made its renowned Constitution 101 course free for all Americans to take online—the same course that every Hillsdale student must take to graduate, regardless of their major.

To check it out, google Hillsdale College, Constitution 101.

Prelude

Mr. Pratt’s education, yet lack of knowledge and the fact that he did not know what he didn’t know, is a terrible problem for our nation. Our nation’s leaders are mostly career politicians; they have, mostly, a good education, but as Mr. Pratt tells us, too often they don’t know, and they don’t know they don’t know. The business arena is highly complex, and in forming the country, the Founders made sure that the government they formed would prevent our leaders from venturing into areas unknown to them and making the blunders and causing the kind of grief that had ended previous democracies. Government members, subsequently, evaded the Founders’ rules, and that has given us the mess that we are seeing now and have been seeing. The economy at the start of 2016 was in the worst condition that I can remember—and I have ninety-three years of life on this planet with which to remember. The Founders limited our leaders from the business arena to the point where they couldn’t do much to hurt the people, the business community, and the economy, but our politicians managed to escape those limits.

Most politicians who run the country have had no experience in business or banking and know little to nothing about the national economy and what makes it work. Unfortunately, you cannot learn that in school—regardless of how long you go, where you go, or how hard you study. You can learn the things you need to know in order to prepare to enter the business world but not how be an engineer or how to do business—produce a product or a service. And then as a new worker learns, his principal concerns are the job that he was hired to do and the products or services his company, or division for a large company, offer for sale

The United States of America’s economy is still different from that of the nations of the rest of the world. It isn’t obvious, so you won’t learn that in school. The difference: there is far less effort to control the economy with regulations, and our government—only in the fringes—is trying to influence the business community and to head the economy in a direction of its choosing. Our economy is still determined by the health of the businesses that make up our economy; it is down when most of those businesses are down economically. And they will be down then for only one reason: there is not enough money in circulation. You have to have had experience in the business world to know that—and banking and financial–sector knowledge doesn’t help much.

We and our government depend on new money obtained from the business sector to pay our bills, to make savings, and to keep us going in a reasonable fashion. Our money income comes from no other source. We need banks and the financial sector for savings; we need a place to which we can go with our money for savings and a way to make them grow. If we put them under our mattress, the money may be safe, but government activities prevent that. Since the 1930s, the value of our currency has decreased severely. During a time in which products and services were being reduced in costs and prices due to the advances of automation and technology, our government, through the Federal Reserve, was making sure that prices kept rising by reducing the value of our currency. In 2015, to purchase what a 1930 dollar would buy, you had to spend $14.20—according to the US government who caused the situation. As advancements in technology were used by the business sector to reduce their operating costs and make their products and services less expensive, the government was aiming for an increase in prices, and the objective has been a 2 percent increase in prices (called inflation) annually.

Government’s fear has been deflation; that had been a big problem in the 1930s—caused by government. Good deflation—reduced prices from reduced costs due to businesses efforts and automation of machines and processes—was never recognized by the government as a good thing.

As we move along, economic problems from which we have suffered will be discussed, and the reasons for them will be explored.

The lack of knowledge Mr. Stephen Pratt mentioned is still the reigning major problem in the United States; the vast majority of our citizens have no idea of how great we have been, and are, compared to all other nations. And how far we have fallen from previous summits and the reasons. But we still remain far above Europe and other nations. I, with the help of the work of other people outstanding in the business and economics field, am going to try to explain both with this book; we will adhere to facts, try to avoid using business jargon, and strive for clarity so that anybody who has the capacity to read and understand English can comprehend. And we will also suggest ways to improve our future prospects as a nation.

We, on average, are far better off than people of other nations. We will show you that, not only with studies by our people, which have been made and show it, but with the results of studies by European economists. They say our poor people, on average—classified as poor in this country—are only poor in this country.

We will show you that this is the only nation in which a beginner in the private business sector, classified as poor, can evolve, with time, to become one of the top income-earners—to become rich. That beginner can become one of the 80% of American millionaires that were the first in their family to become rich. Our poor, mostly, don’t stay poor.

And we will try to remove the stigma that politicians have placed on the rich. In this country, our rich made it to the top with hard work and talent. They earned their riches—they didn’t inherit them—and they have paid their way with taxes. And in the process, they gave millions of our people jobs—jobs that gave people a good livelihood, and some wealth.

Our government is now operating far outside the limits the Founders defined for it with the Constitution, and we have seen, and are seeing, the reasons the Founders tried to limit their activities. Almost every economic problem we have had in the past, and are having now, has been caused by bad governmental regulations and other activities. Politicians don’t understand the economy and how it works, but they have university-trained economists who can advise them. Unfortunately, university-trained economists who have had no direct experience in our business economy don’t know and don’t know that they don’t know, as Mr. Pratt acknowledged. When a problem normal to the business environment arose, which had a normal business resolution, politicians rushed in with regulations to resolve it. They made the problem, a temporary one, bad, and it lingered. In some of the cases, no problem existed, but members of government thought one might occur.

The primary economic misunderstanding concerning the US economy, particularly among economists with no private business experience, is that the US economy is just like that of Europe’s and other parts of the world. And their advice and observations are built on that misunderstanding. The US economy is not similar to Europe’s. Europe’s governments are all deeply involved in their economies, mostly by directing their businesses, improperly, for the best economic outcome; that makes foreign-government people more knowledgeable about trade, for example, and explains how they can outmaneuver our government people in trade deals. A successful outsider, from businesses during his lifetime, like our 2017 president, Donald Trump, can recognize that and the mistakes that have been made.

Since our beginnings, particularly during the 2000s, due to extensive unwise regulations, the economy is weaker, but nothing exists to stop a beginner in business, who has talent and drive and who begins at the bottom of business income, from rising to the top echelons of US business earnings with time. That is different from the economies of the rest of the world. We have no citizens’ class that entitles those in it to a wage bracket they can hold on to because of who they are. Even our rich, demonized by the political class, don’t have a dependable niche. Of the four hundred richest, only 1 percent retained their earnings for twelve years. We sometimes treat government and Hollywood celebrities similar to how royalty is treated in foreign countries. But if a celebrity loses his/her niche in the profession or a government politician fades from view, he/she fades from US views of royalty quickly. Royalty stature is permanent in the UK and Europe, and this influences the spread of income for government constituents. No royal status; no royal income.

How did we become so different from all the rest of the world?

This Information Is Different and Why

The information on businesses and the economy you find here will be substantially different from that which you have heard, that is popularly distributed; it is far more accurate, and there is a definite reason. The differences are because of knowledge of the business world from deep experience and from the worker’s standpoint. I was a worker, not the manager or CEO of a large corporation, and I finished work as an employee, formed a company, and became a consultant to businesses—then I dealt with CEOs. My background is entirely different from that of almost all university-trained economists who have been telling the world what is going on with businesses and the US economy.

Early on, I delivered newspapers and sold magazines; worked for a small sign company, digging post holes mostly; clerked in a small store; waited on tables and cooked in a small restaurant; was a mail room attendant in a large construction company; and a chemical checker for products of a newly built large munitions company. After naval service in WWII and university training in 1950, I joined General Electric Company, beginning as an engineer in training in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, then Schenectady, New York; medium induction motor design engineer; application engineer for Apparatus Sales Division; in Syracuse, New York, application engineer for New York Empire Sales District (upper state) and part-time sales engineer in OEM, Distributor, and User sales areas; in Waynesboro, Virginia, application engineer and product planner, Specialty Control Department to introduce product moves from electronic tubes to solid-state transistor technology for numerical controls for machine tools and other processes; application engineer and product planner, Specialty Control Department’s new Quality Information and Test (QIT) section, to introduce the new products, develop the sales function, and specialty work. Then I left GE in 1965, and in Sidney, Ohio, became Monarch Machine Tool’s manager of numerically controlled (NC) machine sales; later, national sales manager for all products. Then in 1973, I left Monarch to become, in Ferndale, Michigan, vice president of marketing for AA Gage, Division of US Industries Inc. I finalized my employed-worker career there in 1977.

I had decided to leave that firm in 1976, and my wife, Virginia Shipley (nee Doane), and I formed our own business company. In 1977, I ended employment by others and began working in our own Machine Tool Sales Company, a complete marketing service for metalworking manufacturers—marketing, consulting, formulation of marketing plans and implementation, including organization of internal and external field sales forces, publicity, sales aids, and other promotional material. We specialized in the introduction of new firms or new products of industrial firms, providing them with the full range of services necessary to identify their marketplace, define their market potential, establish market goals, and provide the guidance necessary to realize them. We worked with twenty-eight different companies, of record, large and small. During this time, I visited clients’ customers who were doing unusual work with machines. I reviewed the projects and wrote articles on them for trade publications.

Starting with General Electric, visiting customers to witness and review unusually important equipment they were manufacturing with automated processes and then visiting user-customers to witness and review unusual parts being produced on the machines and then writing about them for important news outlets of the day was highly important—American Machinist, Modern Machine Shop, and Production were the most important publications in our area of expertise in those days.

I made contact with a lot more companies and corporations. I wrote many articles on important applications of machines, starting with GE, used to solve highly important problems during my days as an employed worker and continued afterward visiting clients’ customers to review important applications and writing about them. We produced movies and videos that showed production procedures on some machines. Finally, I wrote a monthly article for six years on advancing automation and computer technology for Metalworking Production and Purchasing magazine.

I think you will agree; I did have experience in business and the economy and had a little knowledge of technology. But one other little thing: I have been a citizen of these United States, at this point, for ninety-three years, so I have experience there also.

That gave me a range of experience that most writers don’t have in understanding our economy and its makeup. But there were areas that were foreign to me—government, financial, banking, etc. In 2000, I decided to learn and understand, and I found a solid way to develop an understanding. I, at that time of my life, had the desire to learn and the time, and I had a library far better than public libraries with which I had been active ever since the 1930s. So bear with me for a while; your other, obvious questions at this point will be explained as we move along.

Before we talk about anything else, let’s begin with the most important information of all.

Chapter I

How Successful Have We Been?

Before we discuss our differences from the rest of the world or anything else, let’s investigate how well we have done compared to the rest of the industrialized world.

Things I Didn’t Know in 1944

In 2003, I discovered an old book I had inherited from my parents when my mother died, America Unlimited by Eric Johnson, published in 1944 while World War II was going on. The author presents the state of our country preceding and during the war years—and I was surprised at what I read. He describes our successes and explains the reasons for them. And he further explains why England, Germany, Italy, France, etc., had lagged so far behind us and would lag behind in the future.

He knew what he was writing about; I will provide information on his background for you a little later.

I didn’t know that before the war began, the United States, with less than 7 percent of the world’s population "used 35% of the world’s railroads, 45% of all the world’s radio sets, 50% of all the world’s telephones, [and] 70% of all the automobiles. It consumed 56% of all the silk in the world, 59 % of all the petroleum, 50% of all the rubber, 53% of all the coffee, and 21% of all the sugar.

A US Department of Agriculture report showed that 85 out of 100 farm families owned a motor vehicle. In France and in England, before the war there was one automobile to 25 persons; in Germany, one car to 55 persons; in Italy, one to 109; and in most of the rest of Europe, Asia, Latin America, the proportion [ran from] one to 1000 to 10,000 [persons]. In America, one of every five persons had an automobile.

It came as a shock to me that in 1939, we were more prosperous than the people of the rest of the world. I thought of Ben Sullivan, a Kingsport, Tennessee, native, who in September 2003 said, Nobody had any money back then—nobody. The comment was made during an interview for an article for Kingsport’s high school newsletter, concerning people’s economic condition in those earlier days. That truly told the story, yet as he spoke the words, we had been, and were, far better off than the people in the rest of the world.

Johnson goes on. Nearly half the total manufactured goods in the civilized world are produced in the United States. Studies made by the League of Nations in 1929, when the whole world was at a maximum level of production, showed that the income of the United States was as large as the income of the next seven or eight richest countries combined—among these [were] Great Britain, Germany, Russia, France, and Japan.

Today, we are reminded daily by the liberal element that we are consuming more than our fair share of the world’s goods and should be ashamed of ourselves. But I’m not ashamed; we can do so because we produce more than the rest of the world. And our immigration picture says that many of the people in the rest of the world want to join us.

Liberal/Conservative Definition

When I mentioned liberal element, I knew I had a problem. The terms liberal and conservative are used extensively, but no one, really, can be sure what is meant by the terms. When speakers or writers use the term, they know what it means, but the readers or listeners have to interpret it with their interpretation and understanding. The term has a range of definitions—check your dictionary. However, whenever you see these terms used in this epistle, know that these are the meanings:

Liberals believe in government action to achieve equal opportunity and equality for all. It is the duty of the government to alleviate social ills and to protect civil liberties and individual and human rights. They believe the role of the government should be to guarantee that no one is in need. Liberal policies generally emphasize the need for the government to solve problems. And they will say anything to show that what they believe is correct.

Conservatives believe in personal responsibility, limited government, free markets, individual liberty, traditional American values, and a strong national defense. They believe the role of government should be to provide people the freedom necessary to pursue their own goals.