Category Archives: Getting Prepared

White Gold: Re-Thinking Wealth in a Post-Collapse Society

Posted on by

White Gold After TEOTWAWKI

This post was first published on the original American Survival Blog and I am republishing it now as part of the merging of Red Alerts and A.S.B.

Imagine yourself in a rapidly de-industrialized America (or Europe, Canada whatever) due to financial collapse exacerbated by food shortages, disease and a chaotic world exploding in the wake of American power receding. Maybe solar storms or an E.M.P. have knocked out the grid, or cap-and-trade has created energy shortages like we see in places like Venezuela and are beginning to see in Europe. Imagine that supermarkets are empty, refrigeration is unreliable and there is no guarantee that things will ever get back to normal. What would you do?

For many survivalists, myself included, the solution is “prepping” for such a scenario. This involves stockpiling long lasting foods and perhaps water if there is no other way to ensure supply. Those are short term solutions however, completely unsustainable for a lifetime. In the long term many survival minded people learn hunting, trapping and fishing skills. This is a sure way to starvation if it is your only option to put food on the table for you and your family as anyone who has ever been hunting or fishing will tell you. A better option is to supplement those skills with the art of growing food and foraging for wild plants. All together you now have a recipe for a short and brutish life much like that of ancient man when he still lived as a hunter-gatherer. Doable but hardly ideal.

Man is a social animal for a reason: our needs are more easily met when we cooperate in large groups. We need an economy to truly live a sustainable lifestyle; we will need to trade with others for things which for one reason or another we will not be able to produce ourselves. In short the best case scenario for a survivalist is to be enmeshed with a large group of people living in an area they are invested in securing who all produce various things that they will trade internally and on occasion with outsiders.

Producing things people will trade for is the ideal for long term sustainability after a collapse. Much has been written on how to avoid looters by looking like you have nothing to loot. Many survivalists are planning on spending years, maybe decades, hiding in bunkers with a select group of fellow survivalists. This too will end badly for many as anyone who can envision several well armed families living in close quarters and sharing finite resources will conclude. Those who survive any coming collapse will do so by being able to produce things others need, not share things from steadily depleting collective pantry. Food would be the most valuable resource of course, although a good seamstress or carpenter will likely be able to get by. What we are talking abut is wealth in the old sense of the word, not acquired through business deals or wise investment but through production.

Eggs, for example, are a kind of wealth. Many suburbanites have begun keeping their own hens for economic reasons (they save money on eggs) but we see more and more that a person with  small flock of chickens is doing something most Americans have little experience with – producing actual wealth. Even survivalists often don’t fully understand this idea, explaining why people who think America is about to descend into a new dark age think one ounce gold coins (or worse, gold certificates) are going to pull them through while the rest of us starve. Gold and silver have their uses (one of which is enriching bloggers pre-collapse) but gold and silver represent wealth. They are not necessarily true wealth.

I’ll give you an example. I have two neighbors in the above worst of the worst case scenario. One has a veritable dragon’s hoard of one ounce gold coins each of which are now theoretically worth $10,000 in the new, desperate America. The other has a micro-farm consisting of a flock of chickens, a couple of milking goats and a large garden. Now let’s suppose that both want to get a couple of bowls of Rob Taylor’s famous five can chili or some homemade cough drops I mixed up in my spare time. What happens? Do I make change for a $10,000 gold coin? Or do I take a small basket of eggs for a batch of chili with a home made cough drop lagniappe? Sans a banking system to standardize currency bartering with precious metals is a risky proposition which is an idea I have put forward to before. This is not to say gold will be worthless, but it will be hard to trade with and if push comes to shove, harder to digest. Historically this has always been the case.

The first verse of the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem reads:

Wealth is a comfort to all men;
yet must every man bestow it freely,
if he wish to gain honour in the sight of the Lord.

This line references the rune Feoh which represents wealth in general but its name literally means “cattle” which was the the measure of wealth the ancient Northern Europeans used. Those who study runes for religious reasons point out this understanding of wealth, as practical goods like livestock and furs, provides both historical and spiritual insight into the runic tradition. For the survival minded of any religion it is instructive to note that people who lived in a harsh environment of low technology and scarcity of resources, livestock was how people measured wealth and was the currency that common people traded with.

Of course, many people don’t have room for cattle or other sorts of livestock like goats which are increasingly popular. But depending on the laws in your areas and rules of your homeowner’s association if you happen to be unlucky enough to have one, almost everyone can own a few chickens or grow heirloom vegetables. These renewable resources have value to you and others. If you find no buyers for your eggs, goat’s milk, and Cherokee Purple tomatoes, you can still use them to provide comfort and security for you and your family which is literally what wealth is. Not so your gold hoard or your ammunition reserves. It is time for survivalists to have a fundamental rethinking of what wealth means and how we can acquire it in a post-collapse world.

Surprise! Trend of Doctors Opting Out of Medicare Accelerating

Posted on by

One of the main things you should have done as soon as the Democrats started fiddling with health care is lock in a doctor who does only private pay, especially if you’re a boomer or are going to end up caring for one. Medicare does not reimburse doctors at a rate that allows them to make a profit so more and more doctors are closing their doors to new patients. This will mean year long waits for people with doctors who take medicare as thousands of new patients compete for appointments with medicare friendly doctors.

From USA Today:

WASHINGTON — The number of doctors refusing new Medicare patients because of low government payment rates is setting a new high, just six months before millions of Baby Boomers begin enrolling in the government health care program.

Recent surveys by national and state medical societies have found more doctors limiting Medicare patients, partly because Congress has failed to stop an automatic 21% cut in payments that doctors already regard as too low. The cut went into effect Friday, even as the Senate approved a six-month reprieve. The House has approved a different bill.

• The American Academy of Family Physicians says 13% of respondents didn’t participate in Medicare last year, up from 8% in 2008 and 6% in 2004.

• The American Osteopathic Association says 15% of its members don’t participate in Medicare and 19% don’t accept new Medicare patients. If the cut is not reversed, it says, the numbers will double.

• The American Medical Association says 17% of more than 9,000 doctors surveyed restrict the number of Medicare patients in their practice. Among primary care physicians, the rate is 31%.

The federal health insurance program for seniors paid doctors on average 78% of what private insurers paid in 2008.

“Physicians are saying, ‘I can’t afford to keep losing money,’ ” says Lori Heim, president of the family doctors’ group.

Something the left, comprised of generation upon generation of people whose every whim was heavily subsidized by others, doesn’t understand. The article goes on to point out tht New York alone had 1100 doctors start refusing medicare. The AARP isn’t happy, but since they are partly responsible for this mess, I’m unmoved.

Make any health care appointments you need now, before the wait becomes almost European.

The Value of Gold

Posted on by

The following quote is from an essay that was included in a book called Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal:

“In the absence of a gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good and thereafter decline to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as claims on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to be able to protect themselves.

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”

The author of that quote was Alan Greenspan. The title of the essay? Gold and Economic Freedom.

As I’ve stated numerous times, gold is a sucker’s bet for true TEOTWAWKI survival situations, but it is one of the best ways to preserve your wealth in economic depression, or just the “rough times” that seem to be ahead. I prefer to stock things people will trade for but gold makes sense for people with large amounts of money sitting in a bank losing value every day.

Andrew Weiner is The Real Reason to Avoid Gold

Posted on by

There is little more irresponsible, asinine and just plain wicked than Congressman Andrew Weiner’s recent declarations about gold. In his much lauded attack on Goldline, which is clearly a Center for American Progress run campaign to destroy Glen Beck’s largest advertiser, Weiner makes bizarre and dangerous claims like gold collector’s coins “could be found much cheaper on similar precious coin seller’s websites” which is basically telling people they should shop around on the Internet for the cheapest sellers.You should simply look for the lowest prices on gold on the web and go from there.

Because there are no Internet scams apparently.

Weiner also implies that gold is a bad investment being marketed by fear. A sentiment echoed by other C.A.P. lapdogs like MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan. Interesting considering C.A.P. funder George Soros is himself hoarding gold while running a anti-gold campaign. It’s almost as if Soros’ lackeys are attempting to drive down the price of gold by claiming it’s overvalued so that there financial master can continue to accumulate gold.

Look, my survival preps don’t include hoarding gold and I explained why in an essay called Gold: A Sucker’s Bet for Long Term Survival. However in that same article (where I do talk about the fear based marketing of gold) I point out that gold is actually a good investment for non-TEOTWAWKI scenarios. If America simply putters along like it has been for years, gold bugs will see great payoffs. Crazed survivalist that I am I think it’s likely we hit third world status fairly soon, and I guarantee you no one is getting a good return on gold coins in Somalia which is what we’ll look after the government starts handing out IOUs to the 40,000,000 Americans on food stamps.

But Weiner is saying something completely different. He’s claiming that gold isn’t a good investment which is just a lie and I’d put forward that he knows it’s a lie. If you are rich, and have settled your debts, the best protection of your wealth is to take physical delivery of gold, silver and platinum. Hell, if you have some free time and live in an area known for gold veins you should buy yourself a gold panning kit and take up prospecting.

Gold will always be worth something, however I personally think people who are on any type of budget are better off paying off their debts, hoarding food, ammunition, seeds and barter goods and moving out of the cities. Andrew Weiner is one of the reasons why.

Make no mistake, now Weiner is using dishonest tactics (like basing his reports slamming Goldline on anonymous postings on message boards) to keep you from investing in gold. His next step, when our currency starts to really collapse, will be to attempt to seize the gold you have. You know, the way FDR did in the 30s.

Sorry goldbugs, but the left has shown you their hand. We’re one bad crash away from a new Executive Order demanding you turn over all you gold to our financially bankrupt government. After that you might be able to sell the gold dust you pull out of a river to some bureaucrat who pays you in food stamps and I’m sure there will be a thriving black market for wedding rings but unless Americans vote out the Weiner’s of the world, and finally stop allowing George Soros to control the American left, your gold hoard is never going to be safe.

Beans and bullets kids. That’s where we are really at now.