Over the years I have studied and researched the 'effects' of the Great Depression through history, recorded events, and live testimony.
I've also prepared several times in the past for the 'next' money crisis. Patriots groups and Christian groups have prophesied time and time again that 'it' was going to happen tommorrow, next week, next year - and the Y2K approaching disaster.
These disaster experts while meaning well are just about as illiterate regarding economic disasters as are the experts telling us that 'all is well' in stock market and banks.
The fact is the banks are really bankrupt because they use an absurd accounting practice where their liabilities are accounted on the books as assets.
The current administration and GOP are fools to think that a totally free market environment will handle all the woes of economic collapse. That kind of thinking in the late 1920s is what left America unprepared for the Great Depression and in large measure caused the Crash.
Bush is a financial business failure. Always has been. His daddy bails him out of jail and out of bankruptcy. But we now have the Kosher Pig Cheney's insane economic theories to deal with. He has stated on the record that 'deficits don't matter'. If deficits didn't matter then why is there a crash of the mortgage market and industry? If deficits don't matter why are bankruptcy filings the largest on record?
The only hope of some revenge against these insane economic policies will be that day we see the last photo of Cheney in the news, and pablum is drooling from his mouth onto his adult bib.
Time and time again preachers and Christian groups have prophesied to get ready for the coming crash, based on biblical misinterpretation and biblical illiteracy. A few such as the Mormons and 7th Day Adventists have set aside the biblical angle and have wisely directed their flocks to be prepared and stay prepared for any disaster.
You have heard many patriot teachers speak as to hoarding gold or silver. I have researched this angle and I would guess that 75% of that advice is worthless. If you have money in savings I agree that you should get silver or gold instead of worthless paper. This guarantees your 'value' stays with your savings. But as far as making a profit on silver or gold forget it. That is most certainly an event that will not happen. That market is rigged against you. Yes, you might purchase silver at $10.00 an ounce and sell it at $20.00 an ounce, but the value of the silver historically remains the same. The worth of silver is NOT how many worthless pieces of paper you can trade it in for, but how many loaves of bread (products) you can exchange for it.
This benchmark has changed relatively little in the past 2000 years. An ounce of silver today buys the same number of loaves of bread as it did in 1925. But you can get 13 times the paper dollars today for that silver ounce that you could only get one paper dollar in 1925. This only shows that the US Fed system has flooded the money market with that much more worthless paper.
So if you have any savings to preserve the 'value' of your savings it is BEST to put it into silver and gold. (NOTE: do not put your silver and gold in a silver-gold warehouse! If a crash occurs, then they go down too, and your metals go to the courts or the creditors)
Also remember that safety deposit boxes are NOT safe places in a depression. The US government owns all rights to those boxes. Just read the history of the Depression and see how the IRS took over those safety deposit boxes.
Even with these safeguards the insane US government, (it will be bankrupt too) might order you to turn over all your gold and silver to them, so they can pay their bills. They did this with gold during the Great Depression.
Most of us do not have enough money in the banks to make the gold and silver options viable at all. A few thousand in the bank will mean nothing to you in the short or long term in the event of another crash.
Hoarding food has been the advice of nearly every well-meaning, disaster-on-its-way prophet. Usually the prophet is 'selling' the long lasting food. While this may help out in the short term during a crash, it is not a solution. You find that much of the food you purchased has soured or been invaded with weavils, or humidity has ruined it, and countless other problems with long-storage food items.
Remember frozen foods will do you no good when the electricity is cut off.
During a depression food prices will fall and fall quickly, to the levels that people can afford. I would trade in all the long term food supplies I purchased for each 'next' disaster for a fishing pole and a hunting rifle. A few hundred spent instead of thousands and this is far more beneficial to you in the long term.
Hoarding is not a solution. Daily sustenance is the goal, and the solutions are finding the methods to achieve this.
The person that can 'do it yourself' is the person that will be in demand for what little work is available. But the 'do it yourselfer' will be the one that survives because he does not have to depend on another.
My advice for the past several years is to stock up on 'do it yourself' books!!! Survival books that teach you how to 'do' things you might never have envisioned doing. Do you know how to kill and dress a squirrel - then cook it for dinner?
I don't know -- but I have a book that shows me how -- and I know my grandfather hunted squirrel to feed his family during the depression. Why hoard thousands of dollars of tasteless and probably damaged long term food supplies when you can spend less than a hundred dollars a year and stock up on fresh SEEDS!
Can you make flour from the dandelions? My father told me of an old black woman in Mississippi during the Great Depression, when he was a child in school, that fed all the school children fresh hot bisquits after school made from dandelion flour. And she had home-made molasses to pour over them! What a treat for dirt poor children during a depression!
STOCK up on HOW TO books! These are better than gold. Biblically speaking from the Wise Solomon, buy knowledge and sell it not. Get cookbooks that teach the old time methods of cooking over wood stoves, using home-made flours, etc.etc.
Get books on how to treat illnesses from flowers, herbs, home-made concoctions. Doctors and health care will be scarce, and if there is a total crash, medicines will disappear from the shelves overnite.
Don't think you'll be able to run to the internet to get the answer you need - there might not be an internet or no electricity to get onto it.
Think in terms of day by day needs -- Not hoarding to 'outlast' a depression. Do you need electricity? How can you generate it? Many of you do not realize that most farms during the depression ran on 12 volt power - not 110 volts! You can buy 12 volt light bulbs instead of hoarding food. You can take an old car generator or alternator and generate 12 volts.
Do you need a how to book to teach you how? That is the question.
Can you turn river water or well water into drinkable water? Yes you can buy filtering systems that will clean your water, assuming there is power and you can afford to pump the water to you. Not a practical solution - those commercial filtering systems in a depression.
But there are books that teach you 'how to' dig a well, filter river or well water, design your own hand pump, etc. We have a very inexpensive 'how to' filter water book on our book site, that the entire system is under a hundred dollars, designed by an engineer that once worked for a water filtering company!
For a fraction of the costs of buying silver and gold (that you cannot eat) -- for a fraction of the costs of hoarding food - you can outfit your family for that day to day survival.
Do you live in the concrete jungle? Perhaps a couple thousand invested in an acre of land outside the city would be worth more than a couple thousand in hoarded tasteless food!
You need to think in terms of tools, whether for the shop/garage ,hunting/fishing or for the kitchen that DO NOT need ELECTRICITY!
Your BOOKS and TOOLS will be the salvation in an economic crash - not silver or gold, not hoarding. You with your human intelligence with it's ingrained instinct for survival is the most important part of the survival equation.
Books are basically considered luxury items in the marketplace. In a crash the big bookstores will disappear with all those type stores that cater to people buying things that are NOT NECESSARY FOR SURVIVAL.
You will see many marriages or cohabitations as solutions for day to day survival. The woman that can skin a coon or a fish and cook it, with the man that can and will hunt and kill the coon, squirrel, rabbit, fish, snake, etc.. that can find the wood or garbage to burn for the stove - families and neighbors working for one goal.. to live this day for tommorrow.
This was the Great Depression - it was it's unrecorded history of survival. Singer Sewing machines survived the crash - why? It was a means for the family to do it themselves and required no electricity.
Learn from our past - our grandparents - get the books where their way of life was preserved as 'how to' books, so we might survive today to live tommorrow.
L. Savage |
13
