Preppers’ PING!
“#10 When Things Hit The Fan The Government Will Not Save You”
What? WHAAAT? What else are my tax dollars for? Where’s that Lock Box? Where’s that imaginary ‘Safety Net’ Mother Government has designed for me?
*SMIRK*
Good list. :)
I was living in a country that saw its banks and currency collapse.
If you had a job that would survive the crash, you still had to survive the crash itself.
The banks closed for a period. All bank accounts were seized and put in a trust. They were paid back a year and a half later as I recall, but at 20 cents on the dollar.
During the transition to the new currency, the banks were closed. For about a month people had to live out of their pantries and with whatever cash they had on hand. Neighbors had to help neighbor.
If you had access to dollars, you were fine, as the tremendous inflation was only in the national currency. As it happened, the upper class was already dollarized for years, rents on upper class properties were listed in dollars, upper class salaries were paid in dollars. Upper class properties were bought and sold in dollars.
This was Ecuador. When the sucre collapsed, they went to the US dollar which extended the advantage of the dollar to the common folk, which the upper class already enjoyed. Previously, contracts were in dollars but blue-collar workers were paid in sucres, which meant with every passing day the dollarized class got a better deal on their labor.
But when the whole country switched to the dollar, the poor were told by the Left that it was a trick to screw the working man. They (with help from Chavez) organized a coup and overthrew the president. But the new government kept the dollar. They still use the dollar.
To put this in US terms, I would say this; if it takes a month to transition to the new banking system, you need a month’s worth of food in the pantry and enough cash on hand to get through the month. Thats if you have a job that will survive the crash. Using what I saw, a month was my bench-mark. But at the time of the crash, a lot of government workers hadn’t been paid in several months. So you may need more. And a skill that you can sell in the unofficial market is worth gold. Everyone always needs plumbers, for example.
The Argentine blogger who writes about living in a collapsed economy has one thing right (well, he has a lot of things right...). When the world ends, it often still looks very normal. But the economy shifts to the unofficial, and you need to be prepared to shift along with it if your job ends during the crash. You have to be much more entrepreneurial than you may have ever expected. Everyone I knew had their own companies and depending upon who had the work, this time I work for you and next time you work for me. Networking was survival.
You list is dead-on.
In Ecuador I didn’t see food shortages but since the currency suddenly lost 80 percent of its value, for ordinary people the price of food went up 500 percent.
In Venezuela, when they made scapegoats out of grocery chains, food disappeared off the shelves instantly. The stores couldn’t re-order since they couldn’t charge enough to pay to re-order.
In Ecuador, the grid was always iffy, so all major buildings, stores, malls, upper class homes even, had generators on automatic switches. They would go on and off all day long seamlessly. The reason was, electricity was subsidized and the government wss broke. So, blackouts for the people without backup.
In Caracas water shortages were common and are more common all the time. When you have the president telling you not to take long showers, something is wrong.
As for credit cards, I’ve already mentioned the banks closing for weeks while they re-organized.
Crime? Rioting? Actually, riots were commonplace, organized by the Left to make the country ungovernable. If we crash, you can expect the same thing. The Left will get people whipped into a frenzy in order to take advantage of the situation; probably many of your own kids may get caught up in it. They’ll especially organize thugs from the slums to take out their enemies; when someone needs to be taught a lesson it gets written off as simple street crime.
Average citizens bartering? Absolutely. The underground economy is the real economy after all. During the crash bartering and neighbor helping neighbor is exactly how you get through. And you start your own little handyman service helping your neighbors, who pay you in whatever they have of value. In a crashed economy, again, people become very entrepreneurial.
And, no, the government won’t save you. They are the reason things crashed in the first place. The government is the ultimate prize and there will be constant turmoil as various factions duel for control. If you need help from a government clerk who hasn’t been paid in three months, you need to find another alternative. People who know how to navigate that problem set themselves up in business doing just that. You’ll hire a guy to work the system for you. He knows the right people. After the collapse you’ll need someone like that from time to time.
American after the crash is Third World America. A disfunctional government. A country that works only because of the unofficial economy, and because people learn to do without the disfunctional government. They find work-arounds, they barter, they use foreign currency in place of their own, they work off the books, and families and friends look after one another.
That should read, "Will Stop Working". They are nothing but worthless pieces of plastic.
Early on in all of this meltdown, an Englishman, a banker, stepped in front of a train over there. I had this image of a guy in a beige trenchcoat, without a belt, just straight, holding an empty briefcase, and just walking out, Anna Karenina style.
I knew there were horrific times coming. But after the stories coming from GREECE, the cradle of Western civilization, lazy, spoiled, unionized Greece, I will not speak ill of Greece again. They’ll sell their statues and national treasures. They’ll sell their islands. They’ll auction off their culture.
There’s no words for it. Well, maybe there is one: Detroit.