If you are self sufficient that is great: ) I have a green house and I grow tomatoes and heirloom veggies almost year round (at least my wife does), but we do it as a luxury. Living off of what we can grow would be tough. I am also in the final stages of designing a solar system to completely disconnect from the grid, but it is not and never will be economically defensible.
I would rather just fend for myself. But I realize not everyone thinks that way.
I completely agree with that sentiment, but why make life harder on yourself than necessary? Investing in a couple of foreign companies to give yourself access to a hard currency might be invaluable. Did you ever read the Cathy Buckle stories from Zimbabwe? The whites survived because they had access to foreign currencies.
Oh, and since you mention it, there are plenty of good ol’ boys in this area who would just LOVE an excuse to shoot the law, but I live in a fairly lawless part of the country. Again, LOL!
Like I said, are you just going to shoot each other up? The problem is that there won't be an 'enemy' to go after.
Here's how it works. You go to sleep and when you wake up the next morning you discover that your savings have been confiscated and that there is a new currency. Anyone receiving anything from the government, SS, pensions, medicare, etc. will no longer be getting anything. You will be seeing fifty percent unemployment. Everything will still be available but you have to have the new currency. What will you do?
Actually, the reason I moved where I did and set myself up as I have was precisely to enable me to survive such a situation.
I have very few needs. If you think about it, people survived in previous centuries with none of the things we consider essentials - money, savings accounts, pension plans, health insurance. All you really need is adequate defense, food, clothing and shelter. A life stripped to those essentials does not have to be unpleasant! It’s the way most people lived up until about 100 years ago - no one received anything from the government and didn’t expect to.
As for an enemy to go after, it would be anyone who tried to interfere with one’s ability to defend, feed, clothe and shelter ones family and friends. At that level, it gets real clear. In the 1930s “revenuers” were killed just for trying to interfere with the liquor supply.....just sayin’
I'm getting into this thread late, but have been following FR's threads on teotwawki type issues for a decade.
You posted:
"Here's how it works. You go to sleep and when you wake up the next morning you discover that your savings have been confiscated and that there is a new currency. Anyone receiving anything from the government, SS, pensions, medicare, etc. will no longer be getting anything. You will be seeing fifty percent unemployment. Everything will still be available but you have to have the new currency. What will you do?"
We agree, however there is a reasonable answer. For many many of the downtrodden, the only apparent answer will be "get as close to the new 'money' power center as possible. Austrian economists have explained the next step, when hyperinflation occurs, those closest to the central bank benefit the most, because they have faster access to the ever increasing numbers of fiat notes.
The hyperinflation mechanism starts in each time frame (be it weeks, days or hours) when the central bank and the people closest to the central bank spend the newly minted fiat notes.
This is where your Johnny Five-O beat cop comes in to the picture. The beneficiaries of the hyperinflation will be supremely concerned about their own security, so the newly hired security forces will be the in the 3rd ring of insiders to receive wages in the newly minted fiat notes.
Johnny Five-O as you mentioned lost everything, and actually lost more than the private citizen who had a private industry job. (Benefits, insurance, and most importantly the paychecks and pension backed by tax collections made under threat of force and seizure.) The situation will draw flies to shiat, and the worst of the worst of the old currency's LEOs will rise to the top of the new security forces. The new security forces only need small numbers of upper cadres to be 'company men', the grunts can be recruited from the downtrodden with promises of 'Iron rice bowls', as the Chinese warlords used to call the enticements. This is how the mullahs control Iran, this is how Mugabe survived the hyperinflation. (to expand on your thoughts) Thousands of police union pension funds in the USA are so severely underfunded the question has become how many hundreds of thousands of LEOs in the USA (and most of the Western world) will be told they have no retirement benefits (or forced to take a 30% to 100% haircut due to lack of capital, hyperinflation and lack of COLA increases) in the coming decade. I do my part by telling this to every LEO I'm on good terms with, and give them realistic alternatives to the rosy pictures painted by the LEO union muckitymucks.
You better be ready to survive off of your stocks for a few weeks minimum, until you figure out a way to get some new money. Probably by selling your gold on a black market. May I humbly recommend Fernando Aquirre's book, "The Modern Survival Manual," which focuses on that scenario, not mutant biker zombie attacks.