Did I say they were illogical? No. I just pointed out that there is always a market for "the sky is falling, we are all doomed" thinking. Just as the guy who wakes up every day and says to himself "today I'm gonna die" will eventually be right, writers who prophesy economic collapse will, I'm sure, eventually be correct.
My point is that living every day in the fear that it will be your last is a poor way to spend life. Spending your entire life investing in gold, MREs and OO buckshot, because some guy with a newsletter or nowdays webpage says the sky is about to fall, is not fulfilling either economically, or spiritually.
Oh, Freepers who want a good gold bug/the sky is falling primer, can't do better than Robert J. Ringer's 1983 classic How You Can Find Happiness During the Collapse of Western Civilization. A review of it can be found here. I still have my copy.
Who knows, maybe this is it. Maybe it is all going down the tubes, and we will be queing up for our Soylent Green ration in a few years. I'm just pointing out that the gold bugs were making the exact same predictions in the years and months just before the greatest periods of prosperiety in our nation's history.
Do you believe that we are "in the years and months just before the greatest periods of prosperiety in our nation's history.?"
That was a great period, and I had many friendly arguments with people about the delayed cost of the unfunded consumption that was driving that "greatest" period. It was one of my arguments that our greatest period of prosperity was paid for by assets generated by the efforts of the "greatest generation" (which was not our generation). The real issue of debate was about the impact of our consumption on later generations. As I remember it, that issue was the heart of the "gold bug" thinking. I don't think the sky is falling, but I do think the US is facing a new order where we are no longer dealing from a position where we hold all the trump cards.