Imagine, if you will, a fantastic near future in which the United States is facing an unmitigated economic implosion. Not just a mere market crash, or a stint of high unemployment, but a full spectrum collapse driven by unsustainable debt spending and hyperinflationary printing. The American people witness multiple credit downgrades of U.S. Treasury mechanisms, the dollar loses its reserve status, devaluation of the currency runs rampant, and the prices of commodities and imported goods immediately skyrocket.

In the background of this disaster, a group of financial elite with dreams of a new centralized economic and political system use the chaos to encourage a removal of long held civil liberties; displacing Constitutional protections they deem “outdated” and no longer “practical” in the midst of our modern day troubles. This group then institutes draconian policies through the executive orders of a puppet president, including indefinite detention, assassination, and even martial law against citizens. For now, let’s just refer to them as “The Swedes”….

The Swedes have an extraordinary array of technological tools at their disposal. The kind of equipment dictators like Stalin and Hitler would have killed for…literally. This technology is so pervasive and so unprecedented in the history of tyrannical governments that average people shiver at the very thought of resistance. The Swedes seem to be invincible.

Some Americans think about escaping to a foreign country before the zealots totally dominate, but ultimately, running is meaningless. The Swedes want a global control grid, not just an American one. Eventually, the expatriates will have to face the music as well.

Others believe that they can take their families and hide alone in far off mountains to wait out the storm, but they do not consider what will happen to their country and its principles while they curl up in a ball and pray that the catastrophe does not touch them. They forget that survival is hollow if one finds himself and his culture enslaved in the meantime.

And yet others, those who are aware of the consequences of unchecked oligarchy, decide to build communities of liberty minded individuals in preparation for the dangers ahead. They seek local and national solutions, social and political. However, always in the backs of their minds sits the understanding that these situations rarely if ever solve themselves, and rarely if ever end peacefully. Despots only respect one thing – Power. Those who refuse to fight back are, in their eyes, nothing but an easy meal, like a wounded animal in a forest of wolves. This third group of awake Americans comes to realize that one day the Swedes will move with severe aggression, and will have to be physically stopped. But how…?

With modern computer-driven weaponry at their fingertips, any resistance appears futile. Some Americans, though, do their homework, and discover that most successful revolutions against better equipped opponents utilize low tech methods in highly intelligent ways. They study the inherent weaknesses of the enemy weapons platforms using readily available online manuals and scientific journals. They realize that these pieces of equipment costing millions of dollars each can be defeated using methods that cost little more than pocket change. A war of economic attrition ensues, whereby the Swedes find themselves completely dependent on systems that cannot be maintained without substantial financial sacrifice. With each new piece of hardware, comes an even more frustrating strategy of defiance. Here are just a few examples…

CCTV Surveillance Grid

Sam is a Liberty Movement sympathizer caught in the city during the establishment of a high-tech surveillance grid in his hometown. The dastardly Swedes relish the idea of being able to keep tabs on every person everywhere. They even establish a database in the heart of Colorado which collates information in real time, allowing them to build and organize files on millions of citizens. The success of this grid depends greatly on the capacity of their CCTV cameras placed in an ever expanding spider’s web across heavily populated regions. The cameras use biometric data collected and stored by airport body scanners which the “extremists” often refer to as “naked body scanners”. The data allows computers to quickly match specific body signs to identity.

The Swedes told the public that their data would not be saved for future reference, but of course, this was later found to be a lie. It did not take long before the scanners were moved from the airports, to train stations, to bus stations, to federal buildings, to street corners for random shakedowns. Sam knows that if his file is pulled up by one of the cameras, he is in serious trouble, and so makes plans to escape the city limits. With curfews being set earlier and earlier in the evening, he decides to make his move before it is too late.

The night vision and thermal vision capabilities on the latest CCTV cameras makes disguise nearly impossible. Makeup and prosthetics help to hide bone structure, and a knee brace helps to change the gait of Sam’s walk, but Sam also knows that the thermal filters on the cameras are actually able to see the heat of blood flow through facial arteries, which act as a face fingerprint. There is no low-tech way to forge this face fingerprint.

So instead, Sam decides to block the camera system’s ability to use thermal vision at all. He does this with a few dollars and a hat, gluing small Infrared LED lightbulbs into the cap along with a tiny battery source. The IR lights drown out the CCTV ability to make any clear distinctions in his face, thus preventing any positive ID. Sam is clever, and plants similar IR devices on other people without their knowledge, diluting the attention of Swedish law enforcement officials who are left wondering if their cameras are malfunctioning or if their city is swarming with “terrorists”.

Fingerprint Scanners

Angela is a worker in a Swedish detention facility. At first, she believed that all the people quartered in the facility were terrorists who represented a threat to innocent lives. But, over time, she came to realize that the true innocents were being housed in the prison, most of them detained for no more than criticizing Swedish policy or protesting a political injustice. Angela makes plans to steal confidential information on the camp from her boss’ office and hand it over to the resistance. Unfortunately, her boss uses a fingerprint scanner to unlock his door. Luckily, she had done research into fail-test methods for such scanners in scientific and security journals and learned how to make molds using latent fingerprints.

RFID Chips

RFID chipping is all the rage with the Swedes, so of course they were more than keen to introduce the intrusive technology to the U.S. once the control grid was established. The tiny inexpensive chips allowed tracking of nearly everything, from retail habits, to civilian movements, to common monetary transactions. Evan, a computer hobbyist and quiet supporter of the Liberty Movement, found that without certain RFID designations, many goods could not be purchased, at least in bulk. Only Swedish officials had the ability to go anywhere and to buy what they needed.

Evan found a solution, not necessarily “low-tech”, but easy enough to make using common materials and a basic knowledge of electronics and programming. His idea? Build an RFID Emulator/Cloner.

The cloner had the ability to read particular RFID chips, even from a distance, and to then copy their unique signal. Evan was able to clone any chip anywhere and then implant the code on an RFID card or any other item containing a chip, making life easier for him, and information easier to get for others.

GPS Tracking

Evelyn was a political activist and independent journalist before the crash. Her writing had become quite prominent in freedom minded circles, but the dollar had fallen, and with it, the Constitution had been scrapped. Her criticisms of the Swedish controlled government were well known, and she had heard stories of liberty writers “disappearing”. She decided to leave the confines of the city to stay with a friend before the noose was tightened completely.

As she entered her vehicle and made her way outside the city along backroads, away from the highway and possible checkpoints, she noticed that a nondescript car seemed to be shadowing her from a distance. She made a few unplanned turns, and did not see the car again for twenty minutes. Then, it appeared again, at the very edge of her mirror’s field of vision. She realized that she may have a GPS tracking device implanted somewhere in her car, and to find it quickly would be impossible. Thankfully, she had purchased a GPS jamming device months ago, which allowed her to block any GPS transmissions within a small to medium radius. The device was furiously labeled by the FCC as “dangerous” and “illegal to use”, however, they remained very easy to buy until the crash.

Electronic Surveillance In General

Whether it be a CCTV camera, or a body scanner, sometimes the best option is not to evade or disguise, but to pull the plug entirely. At least, that was James’ point of view after the control grid went into overdrive and he couldn’t walk his dog without a blue-shirted Swedish agent fondling him on the sidewalk or forcing him to walk through a body scanner. Finally, he had had enough, and so, decided that if they wanted to track every move of every person, it was going to cost them.

Using commonly available parts, James built a personal EMP device. Its range was dependent on the size of the power supply he tied to it, but when used properly, it would zap anything with a circuit within several feet of him.

The Body Scanners were useless. RFID tags went blank. CCTV cameras shorted. They would eventually be replaced, but the cost would be high, and as long as he didn’t get caught, James could experience, at least for a short time, the America of the past…

Sound Cannon / Silence Gun

Mary had seen her family in poverty, her country in ruins, and her government turn to outright treason. In her mind, the only recourse left was to take to the streets. However, this proved to be almost as useless as participating in the election process. New sound cannon vehicles were deployed in waves along with riot police to quell any and all protests, no matter how peaceful in nature.

Mary learned two things quickly. The first: always bring a gas mask to the party. The second: always think simple when faced with technological tyranny.

The sound cannon blast was terrible, making concentration difficult and causing panic amongst the protestors. Even worse though was the Silence Gun.

Which actually recorded and then projected back a person’s voice only a split second after they began to talk, causing mental confusion and eventually, frustration and silence. The device was popular at political events where activists were likely to interrupt a candidate’s teleprompter speech to expose the public to a few truths. Mary was not a hacker, or a military specialist, or a technician of any kind. So, she wore ear plugs. Problem solved.

Night Vision / Thermal Imaging / Predator Drone

A considerable threat to those who decided to fight back against the Swedes was the widespread usage of night vision and thermal imagers by troops sent to hunt down and capture dissenters (the Swedes called them “enemy combatants). The use of FLIR cameras on aircraft and the feared predator drones were especially terrifying to those who knew very little about how such technology actually functions.

David, an insurgent against Swede governance, was tired of hearing about how the Predator Drones would be the doom of all who defied the establishment. He felt that this outlandish perception came more from the fact that the drones had no human passenger, and so, no potential casualty risk. The concept of facing down a machine that feels no combat apprehension is certainly disturbing, but not insurmountable. At bottom, what the enemy cannot see, the enemy cannot kill. And so, instead of trying in vain to fight the drones and their thermal / night vision on the terms of the oppressive military presence, he decided to make their vision advantage irrelevant by studying IR evasion used in sniper training.

Regular night vision relies, in most cases, on the use of an IR light which bounces off targets within the field of view. This is often referred to as “Active IR”. Thermal Vision reads existing IR at a different wavelength, usually in heat producing or high IR producing bodies, called “Passive IR”.

For evading Active IR night vision, David found that regular camouflaging methods along with smoke worked well. For defeating night vision altogether, he found that bright IR flashlights and floodlights, and even regular bright lights like camera flashes, shined directly at the target wearer of the night vision device, would be blinded for a short period of time, leaving room for escape.

Thermal vision evasion was more difficult. David and his team first studied the IR Emissivity Tables of common everyday materials.

[And how to check emissivity here.]

All objects above the temperature of absolute zero release a certain level of electromagnetic radiation, which thermal imagers pick up and translate into a visual picture. Hiding one’s heat signature is difficult, but not impossible. The key, as David learned through military sniper training manuals and combat analysis, was to match his IR signature with that of his surrounding as much as possible.

He fashioned a hooded cloak using a material that would block much of his initial warmth, then lined the inside of it with emergency space blanket material, which reflects back around 90% body heat. The cloak design worked well because he could easily take down the hood and unwrap himself when not in immediate danger, allowing the material to cool as he walked.

Then David attached local vegetation to the material to help match its IR Emissivity to the surrounding foliage. This combination reduced his thermal signature drastically. Overhead drones could not identify him clearly as a human, if they were able to see him at all. Ground forces were a greater threat, but the element of surprise was still possible for the insurgents with cloaks.

In combat, the tandem dangers of drones overhead and ground forces in pursuit with thermal vision made life difficult. David carefully studied field guides to Predator Drone strengths and weaknesses.

David and his team then utilized a special strategy under these extreme circumstances called “False IR Signature”.

Operating in bad weather gave the freedom fighters an instant advantage. Heavy rain washed away thermal footprints and obscured body heat. Thick cloud cover made image integrity poor. Contrary to popular belief, the drones had many downfalls, and their eyes were limited in numerous ways.

When in the middle of combat, where drone surveillance was most dangerous to low-tech resistance, multiple fake IR signatures were created using whatever was available. David used a combination of IR Chemlights and hot burning road flares thrown all over the field to misdirect drone cameras. With IR hotspots everywhere, the thermal cameras had no idea where to focus, let alone which targets were real, and which were fake. IR strobe light flares flashed intermittently causing even more confusion, and masked to some extent muzzle flash from firearms.

Larger objects could also be faked using pieces of metal heated with fire, or even heated metallic balloons arranged in a sizable pattern to mimic a hot running car or tank. Drones would zero in on false targets and unleash missiles, only to waste the expensive ordinance on party favors and scrap. Through David’s knowledge and efforts, the game had become more level.

Technology Or Force Of Will?

Technological weaponry and surveillance should never be underestimated. Today’s advancements are terrifying, devastating, and were designed after decades of trial and error in peripheral wars and burgeoning dictatorships around the world. A technology cannot be defeated by someone who does not respect its capability. That said, in the end, wars are not won with fancy gadgets alone. All conflicts are decided by a primary driver; force of will.

Who has the strength of spirit to endure the longest? Who has the intelligence to outwit the technology? Who knows exactly what they are fighting for and why? These questions decide victory, not unmanned aircraft and computers.

In the introduction, I joke a little about the state of our Republic, but sadly, the fictional accounts above represent realities that Americans today must consider as practical and possible in the near future. “The Swedes” are not illusion, but a parable of the kind of totalitarianism that arises in the midst of any culture dominated by elitism and collectivism. Whether you believe this is realistic or not in our nation today I suppose is dependent on your level of awareness surrounding current events. My goal in covering the information above is not to convince you one way or the other of the dangers ahead. The point is to redistribute the knowledge so that one day, in the event that the stories portrayed turn out to be more true than you realize, you may have the ability to do something about those troubled times as an effective champion, rather than a helpless victim…

Regards,

Brandon Smith

Low-Tech Solutions to High-Tech Tyranny was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

“You’ve once again had your 401k and IRA whacked by the incessant lies and scams promulgated by your government and the ‘financial wizards’ who seduced you back into the markets with half-truths and siren songs.

“The market opened this morning down 300+ DOW points and the VIX slammed through the 40 level. There will clearly be bounces along the line but as things stand right now the underlying financial conditions have not changed one iota from where they were in 2007. Instead of allowing those who were overlevered to go bust and have capitalism do what it does best — creative destruction of the foolish — we instead took private effectively-defaulted risk and transferred it to the public balance sheet.

“But that’s a scam — it simply moves the deck chairs on the economic Titanic, because governments can only raise funds through two means: They can borrow money (increasing leverage) or they can tax it (decreasing consumption or investment by private parties.) The obvious “borrow it” choice was made here in the US and elsewhere, but just as with private borrowing government borrowing has limits and we’re now running into them, and deficit spending creates false demand signals in the economy that must eventually end.

“Recognition that you’ve been scammed can be a truly ugly thing. It is usually violent at an emotional and financial level, and more often than one would like it has a habit of being violent in the physical sense as well.

“Well, America (and the world), you’ve been scammed by the financial institutions and governments for the last 30 years. 2008 was the first spasm of recognition but was short-circuited by…. you guessed it…. even more scams. Rather than demand truth and an end to the games the American consumer lapped up the frauds and schemes of the politicians on both sides of the aisle who conspired with the financiers to rip you off once again.

“The opportunity to address these issues as I have been tirelessly attempting to do, was ignored by those in policy roles in Washington DC. Those who have been reading The Ticker are well-aware of my efforts going back into 2007 and through the 2008 Presidential campaign on both sides of the aisle, along with my efforts since.

“They’ve been ignored with the political establishment choosing to knob-job the banks and lie to you, the public, rather than address the fact that the entire last 30 years have been one gigantic economic scam and that what they were attempting to do could not, as a matter of mathematics, succeed.

“Now recognition of that fact is dawning on people in a convulsive fashion, and markets of all sorts are reacting as one would expect when their entire worldview is exposed as having been a gigantic and intentional pyramid scheme constructed of debt layered upon debt that cannot be paid down. The wrong thing was done in 2008 and there is zero evidence that our government has changed one iota in their singular focus on misdirection and lies in this regard.

“Welcome to awareness; I hope you’ve taken the last couple of years to become prepared.”

Source: Market Ticker

Denninger has for years put forth mathematically undeniable empirical evidence that shows not only how unsustainable our system is, but the lunacy in the government’s purported solutions and response.

Our debt load is too high. Our production capacity has been decimated. Our GDP growth is negative and has been for a decade (if you look at the real data).

It may very well all be coming to a head. While we opined earlier that the triggers for the meltdown of the last 24 hours may not have been a loss of confidence in the US dollar, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen as a result of what will play out in coming weeks and months.

It’s clear that stock markets world wide are in panic mode, and this will not bode well for investors, as Denninger suggested in a commentary yesterday:

“I’ll go ahead and make the prediction now: This time will be worse than 2008 and we’ll measure from SPX 1370, which makes the minimum downside target under 600. And no, this time it won’t recover with more ‘hopium’ and fraud — that card has already been played which means the pension funds and annuities across this nation are going to get smoked, exactly as I warned about four years ago.”

Consider the implications of what led to the collapse of 2008, our failure to resolve the problem, the obscene debt we created in the last three years, and the economic disaster that is the American job market.

Many have been holding out hope that “they” will do something to keep everything normal.

They won’t.

So if you haven’t spent the last two or three years preparing, then we’d recommend you get into high gear right now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Now.

The world as we have come to know it, in one way or another, is going to crumble over coming years. It may happen overnight in a rapid waterfall collapse, or it may deteriorate over several years. Regardless of how it happens or exactly how long it takes, we’re running out of time and the outcome will be the same. In The Redline: A Tale of Collapse, Brandon Smith depicts a scenario that may not be too far off from what reality will look like in America in the not too distant future.

Suffice it to say that if you want to avoid, or at least insulate yourself from, living in a world of poverty, violence, and despair, consider how you can become more self reliant today.

• What will you do if commerce stops due to a currency collapse and the banks are closed- how will you buy food, medicine and bare essentials?
• Can you grow your own food or raise micro livestock?
• Do you have the ability to protect yourself at home or in public?
• What skills do you bring to the table that will be of use when the service industry in America collapses — what are you capable of producing?
• How prepared are you to sustain your family in the event of a hyperinflationary or hyperdeflationary collapse — what will you use to pay your monthly mortgage and bills if traditional currencies collapse or you lose your primary income stream?

All of these questions and many more should be at the top of your list of things to do right now.

Obviously, mainstream media, government and central bankers have been lying to us about the state of our economy and financial markets. Perhaps preparedness minded web sites like SHTFplan and Whiskey & Gunpowder are wrong.

But what will you do if we’re right?

Regards,

Mac Slavo

I Hope You’ve Taken The Last Couple Of Years To Prepare was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

This flies against policy (our policy) of never buying anything except that which can be paid for at the time of purchase – and even though I know full-well that we won’t really own the land, just as we don’t really own the land we have (or the house that sits upon it) because owners don’t pay rent in perpetuity to the government, which we, like all “owners” must (in the form of annual property taxes) if we wish to continue to be allowed to remain on the land (and in “our”) house.

Anyhow.

We did this deed as a way to hedge against what I am increasingly convinced is coming – the destruction of the dollar, followed about five minutes after this becomes common knowledge by the final implosion of what’s left of the American economy.

Land – physical land – is a good way (perhaps the only way, in a major economic crisis) to keep at least some of your wealth intact and more importantly – if you act in time – a way to transfer the value of fiat dollar-denominated assets into something tangible, of real value.

Gold, of course, is another way to do this but it has a major disadvantage: It is only valuable as a sort-of proxy for wealth; that is, it has value only as long as someone else who has something you want is willing to trade you what he has for the gold you have – which means that he (the owner of the item you want) must believe he will be able to then swap the gold he gets from you to some other person who has something he wants, something that’s not gold. Put another way, gold is fungible only if there’s a still-operating economy.

If the worst happens and the system really does experience a catastrophic collapse, the value of gold may collapse along with it – at least, for awhile. Until civilization re-assembles itself. But in the meanwhile, what will you do with your gold? It is pretty to look at but you can’t eat it and outside of a few specialized industrial applications that won’t matter during a period of crisis, it is useless.

Land, on the other hand, not only has tangible value (like gold) and is fungible (also like gold) because you can always convert it into gold or trade/sell it for something else you value – but perhaps much more importantly, in a time of real crisis, land can give you life.

Literally.

You can grow food on land – which could mean the difference between life and death, when the system runs off the rails and Costco and Safeway are looted to the linoleum. Which – count on it – is sure to happen the moment the masses get a whiff of the dollar’s imminent collapse. And you can hunt on land, too – assuming enough acreage.

But the number one advantage to land, as I see it, is physical distance between yourself – you and your family – and the latter-day Golden Horde that is already in the process of forming itself up. (Witness the so-called “flash mobs” of “youths” in Wisconsin, Philadelphia and other places.)

Just as it is harder for a thug to assault you from 20 yards away than when he’s right up in your face, you stand a better chance of making it through what may be coming if you and yours are not in the immediate vicinity (or path) of the rampaging mobs. They may not even notice you – and more significantly, you will enjoy a greater likelihood of noticing them before they notice you. In old-school cowboy lingo, this means getting the drop on them. And that can be the difference between life and death as much as having some food and other supplies stored up to get you through a few months of hard times.

In the most extreme eventuality – minions of the Clover State [the Clovers are the authority-worshiping apologists for any action by the state, no matter how egregious--ed.] coming to round you and yours up for “relocation” to a FEMA camp or god-knows-what-else in the immediate aftermath of a SHTF-type scenario – you have the option of just…disappearing. Of going off the grid, into the heart of darkness. It will not be easy. It will certainly not be pleasant. But it is much more pleasant than the alternative.

I am in my 40s now and like most people in that age bracket, I like my comforts. I enjoy having my motorcycle and car projects; even doing the chores around the place that need to be done. But if the S does H the Fan, I will do everything in my power to make it through to the other side of whatever’s coming, which will hopefully be something better than what we have now. But above all else, I will not Submit and Obey. If they come for me and mine, if they are not willing to leave us be in return for us extending the same common decency toward them – well, then we have options.

Because we have some land.

If you are reading this, there is still time for you to do the same. I hope you will consider it – and I hope you can make it happen.

Meanwhile, let’s hope for the best and that all we’ll be doing next summer is cutting the grass…. .

Regards,

Eric Peters

http://epautos.com/2011/08/17/a-not-car-column/

Eric Peters is a Washington, D.C.-based automotive writer and frequent contributor to the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Investors Business Daily and Washington Times, among others. In his free time, he enjoys working on old cars and currently owns a 1964 Chevy Corvair Monza coupe and 1976 Pontiac Trans-Am equipped with a modified 455 V-8.

Land More Valuable Than Gold In A Total Meltdown was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Bloomberg Business reported in January that housing starts fell again in December to a 529,000 annual rate. The annual rate in a good economy is considered to be a million new homes per year. The recent peak in 2005 was 2 million homes. Nationally, production for the residential construction industry has dropped about 75% off its peak. Inflation, lack of wealth, and rising energy costs preclude any great gains in housing output in the near future. The majority of the skilled construction workers will be doing something other than residential construction in the near future.

What is it that we’ll be doing? First off, we are craftsman. “Craftsman” is a mind-set, a personality type. Throughout history, craftsmen have exchanged their labor, skills, and ideas for the expendable wealth of those who have it. That is the ball upon which we need to keep our eye. Many of us will likely still be craftsman in the next economy.

The best-run construction companies will be able to get lean enough to live through the hard times and carve out a niche in the new residential construction industry. Most companies and individuals will not make it back. The current overextended financial situation in the U.S. will cause our world to “shrink.” Inflation and sharply rising fuel prices will force a lot of economic activity back down to the community level.

Many things that we currently take for granted will become more difficult to obtain. Acquiring food, fuel, heat, and shelter will take on a greater importance in the day-to-day life of the middle class. I’m not talking about the Apocalypse. I’m just saying that things will not be as comfortable as they once were. You and your fellow middle classers will be conducting more business within your neighborhoods and communities.

What do we craftsman do in the transition? First of all, keep your hand in the old construction game as long as you can. Do not create new debt for yourself. Do not bid jobs so close to the bone that you have no wiggle room. If something goes awry, and it usually does, you will have either new debt or legal problems.

Speaking of new debt, get out of your old debt. The leaner you emerge from this transition period, the better your choices will be. If you have any liquid assets, consider owning some physical silver. Cash will be eaten away by inflation. Gold is too hard to trade casually, too dangerous to possess. Silver, cash, and labor hours are excellent barter items. Barter will be big at the community level. Be prepared to swap your skills for someone else’s.

As a craftsman, imagine using your set of tools and skills to create or assist in what is going to be needed for a local economy. Think along these four lines as a start…repairing versus replacing, expensive petroleum, rental property, and food. It is likely then some or all of your skills can find a home in these areas.

Today and in the future, broken items will be repaired to a much larger extent than in the past. We will cease in large part to be a throwaway society. Learn how to cut glass. Windows and doors can be repaired, instead of replaced. Learn to rebuild a door or window frame. Make use of used and recycled materials. Start sorting the debris from your jobs, de-nail and store reusable items.

Petroleum product prices will rise faster than the inflation rate. Supply is flat, and demand from Asia will continue to increase steadily. Home heating will be increasingly augmented by wood stoves. Learn how to rebuild old wood stoves and install them. Firewood will be needed. Can you produce firewood efficiently enough to make a profit? Diesel fuel will be expensive. Does anyone in your area already make biodiesel? If not, look into it how it is done.

You probably have a truck; combine your errands with others to cut down on fuel usage and earn yourself extra cash or barter. If you have a wood lot or access to one, what about a sawmill? You and others will always need lumber. The scrap can be used for heat. You could run the mill on biodiesel or alcohol. Dare I even bring up the possibility of a still?

There will be an increase in the need for rental properties. Being a landlord is not for everyone, but if you have the initial assets, why not use your skills to become a landlord? Buying older buildings and converting them into multiunit apartments takes lots of capital and labor, but should be a profitable endeavor in the next decade. Unfortunately, foreclosures will continue, and those families will be renting their next living space. Look carefully and thoroughly into this option before jumping in.

Some of your neighbors will look into animal husbandry and gardening to secure some of their food supply. They will need help: shelters, outbuildings, fences, and access to water. Look into how to build and use a smokehouse. Know who in your community does butchering. Build a business relationship now. Canning will become more important. Consider one good outdoor summer kitchen for the neighborhood. Canned food and veggies are good barter, and so is home-baked bread and home-brewed beer.

Start small with any of these new directions. Keep yourself in the residential housing trade as long as possible. If you can, make a transition into a service or manufacturing sector of the economy as well. Keep as many options open as possible.

Imagine this transition period as a river to be crossed. The banks of the old economy are behind us. The current is fast, the obstacles are numerous. Don’t allow yourself to drift with the current. Use your craftsmanship as your paddle, drive yourself forward, and steer around the rocks. Pick your path through the transition and aim for your spot on the opposite shore. The craftsmen that emerge from this transition period prepared and on course may well find themselves involved in a life more gentle and satisfying than the one they left.

Regards,
Jim Kearns
Whiskey & Gunpowder

February 11, 2011

A Self-Employed Carpenter’s Continued Thoughts on the Future was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

President Obama’s speech to the nation a week ago was designed as a kind of blowout preventer for the legitimacy of the federal government. It did little to stop the hemorrhaging of confidence in political leadership. A nation foundering in a crippled vessel in the horse latitudes of collective purpose on a sea of red ink looks to its captain — who puffs a few platitudes into the tattered sails and retreats belowdecks to pace and stew. This is a society truly lost at sea, where even the friendly dolphins are turning belly-up and the dying seabirds stare accusingly under their cloaks of crude oil. The feeling grows that we can’t do anything right. Will someone please turn off the TV?

In 2008, the voters turned to a lanky newcomer from Illinois to rescue itself from just the sort of technocrat jerkoffs who had run the nation into a ditch with their invocations of “mission accomplished” and “Good job, Brownie.” Change was in the air. Alas, consistent with the apparent fact that history rhymes but doesn’t repeat, Barack Obama proved to be the reincarnation of Millard Fillmore, not Abe Lincoln. Sometimes history works in free verse and this stanza was off by a few syllables. It turns out that change was exactly the one thing not really in the air. America does not want change, except from the cash register at WalMart.

The last time America faced a convulsion as profound as the present one was the late 1850s. The internal contradiction of slavery was driving the nation crazy. The Whig party had been running things for a couple of decades. The Whigs were the party of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. They tried everything possible to finesse the expansion of US territory around the inflammatory issue of slavery. Fillmore came along just in time for the Compromise of 1850, which was intended to settle things and did absolutely nothing to settle things. By the time the election of 1852 happened, Both Webster and Clay were old men preparing to meet their maker and the Whig party absolutely fell apart. Scroll forward a few years and we’re in the slaughterhouse of The Civil War.

A hundred and sixty years later now, and the USA faces a new and very different set of internal contradictions. We’ve ramped up a living arrangement that has no future, just as slavery had no future. We’re uncomfortable with the mandates of reality, which is trying to tell us we have to live differently. The American people don’t want to hear this. The president doesn’t want to tell them. It’s possible that he is not tuned into the reality radio station that is broadcasting its mandates. You’d think the Macondo Blowout horror show was coming across loud and clear.

Right after President Obama gave his vapid speech last week, he traveled to Ohio to brag about how much federal stimulus money was going into “shovel-ready” highway projects there. I sincerely believe that the last thing we need right now in this country is more and better highways. Every president since Jimmy Carter has acknowledged that there’s a problem with our extreme oil dependency, but none of them have made the short leap to understand that we have a more fundamental problem with car dependency. Someone paying attention to the mandates of reality would get the choo-choo trains running from Dayton to Columbus to Cincinnati to Cleveland — and he would tell General Motors to get into the business of making railroad cars so we don’t have to import them from Canada.

Reality is telling us to downscale and get different fast. Quit doing everything possible to prop up the drive-in false utopia and all its accessories. Get local. Tighten up. We have no intention of doing that. The idiocy that passes as informed opinion wants the US money managers to kick out the jambs handing out more money created out of thin air to promote a fantasy called “recovery.” To what purpose? To keep the tailgate parties going down at the NASCAR ovals? Over at The New York Times Monday morning, the fatuous Paul Krugman says that “stinting on spending now threatens the economic recovery.” Earth to Krugman: we’re mismanaging contraction. Further expansion is just not in the cards right now for the human race. We don’t need more people on the planet and we don’t have the means to accommodate them. There will be no ‘recovery” to “growth” — especially by means of pumping more oil into the system. There is no techno-miracle alt-fuel panoply waiting in the wings to take over from oil. And there is no res
earch-and-development program that will make it happen, no matter how many acronym-studded incantations we drone out.

I admit that contraction is a hard reality — but so is the recognition that we don’t get to live forever, something every child begins to grapple with around age seven. The inability to face comprehensive contraction will only insure that its side effects are more debilitating.

Regards,
James Howard Kunstler
Whiskey & Gunpowder

June 23, 2010

Mismanaging Contraction was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

An insight on this question came from an unexpected quarter.

A gentleman by the name of Fernando Aguirre, who posts on Internet forums and his blog as FerFAL, has written voluminously about his experiences as an Argentine citizen during and after the economic cataclysm that wracked his country in 2001. I first found a long forum post, and then a Google search of “FerFAL” revealed a larger web presence, including a recently published book.

Mr. Aguierre shares his thoughts on all sorts of related subjects, from food storage to guns to politics (he appears to really like Rep. Ron Paul). I personally found a great deal of value among what I’ve seen so far.

One brief passage struck me, however, because it related to the mechanism by which middle-class people become poor during an economic meltdown. The mechanism may be obvious, but it is important to see how theory actually worked in the real world.

Mr. Aguierre shares (in “Part IV”) how, while studying architecture following the 2001 crisis, a social studies teacher illustrated Argentina’s middle class’ slide into poverty. Quoting the teacher from memory, Mr. Aguierre writes,

“[Those in the] middle class suddenly discover that they are overqualified for the jobs they can find and have to settle for anything they can obtain, therefore unemployment sky rockets: too much to offer, too little demand. You see they prepare, study for a job they are not going to get. You kids, you are studying Architecture because you simply wish to do so. Only 3 or 4 percent of you will actually find a job related to architecture.”

We all sat there, letting it all sink in. After a few months, it all proved to be true. Even the amount of students that dropped out of college increased to at least 50%. They either [saw] no point in studying something that would not make much of a difference in their future salaries, had no money to keep themselves in college, or simply had to drop college to work and support their families.

This reads like a premonition.

The USA’s middle-class includes lots of people whose careers rest on higher education and specialized certification. While plumbers, electricians, factory employees and truck drivers typically are among the middle-class, most of those populating suburbia are accountants, middle managers, sales people, financial consultants, teachers, nurses, writers, etc. In other words, as manufacturing and now building activity contract, more of the middle class is made up of the college-educated in white-collar careers.

Factor in our current economic pickle and it’s easy to see the most likely path ahead.

With the economic expansion built on mass optimism and debt rolling over, conditions are now fertile for questioning the college degree system as jobs for the college-educated evaporate en masse. The ability of technology to replace white-collar jobs is widespread, and an increasing need to cut costs is finally driving its use, just as changing economic (and regulatory) conditions also drive the replacement of manpower with robotics in the factory.

Across the economy, the need to cut employment costs (not just payroll, but payroll taxes and benefits) is resulting in mass layoffs of sales people and white-collar office staff. When one considers how much work can be replaced now by accounting software, electronic sales presentations, flatter organizational structures, and “news persons” filing reports for free on the Internet via blogs, it is obvious that vast numbers of middle-class Americans teeter on the precipice of unemployability, not just unemployment.

When the “unique” skill sets that commanded $50,000 to $100,000 (or more) annual salaries turn out to be in vast oversupply, the only course left is to compete with those with neither a college degree nor technical education for jobs that can’t support a middle-class lifestyle.

Hands-on service occupations like nursing and medicine are also far from safe. At the end of the day, it is productivity that pays for such work to be done, and when vast numbers of people cannot find economically productive work, economic reality will land on these occupations, too.

When the economic tide goes out, all boats sink into the mud.

Too many people were goaded into illusory occupations by tax subsidies for higher education, government (rather than market) demand, and other distortions like the credit-without-prior-production of the central bank. Political pandering and central planning replaced the natural balance of an economy growing organically through the honest signals of the price system.

As long as there was enough optimism and ignorance to sustain the illusion, the distortions only grew larger.

Though the ignorance largely remains, there’s no more blind denial left to sustain the burden of all that wasted effort. If your job disappears, it may not come back.

This time it really is different. The final stages of that blind denial included fiscal imprudence that bordered on insanity. The mirage economy can’t return until after the pendulum has swung its full travel to the other side of the arc. That path leads through the valley of a crushing economic depression, one that will radically and permanently alter the lives of middle-class Americans who are almost universally unaccustomed to hardship.

Regards,
David Calderwood

October 29, 2009

Economic Collapse Permanently Destroys Middle Class Jobs was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.