Guns/Ammo the new Gold/Silver?

[Britesea]

The reason gold, silver, and cash are important is because you will still need money for some things. Even if you have 0 debt, and you have food, water, and the ability to make more on your land, off the grid and feeling very self sufficient, you will still have government demanding taxes (which will most likely increase, not decrease); and if you can't pay your taxes, you will be turned off your land to take your chances with all the other poor. You might not need as much money if you are well prepared, but as long as there is government you're gonna have taxes to pay.

The following was sent to me by a friend...

"Its a lovely spring morning. You climb into the car, crank the ignition, flip on the radio, and head for work. But the usual music isnt on the radio. Instead you hear the newscasters announcing that due to deteriorating economic conditions in Europe, the President has declared a bank holiday and will speak to the nation later today.

You quickly take a rough inventory of your situation. You have $7.00 in bills in your wallet, 34 in change in your pocket, and tank of gas in the car. You pull into the next gas station and are met by a hand-lettered sign on the pump which reads CASH ONLY!!! NO CHECKS OR CREDIT CARDS!!! You swing by the bank to see it closed with a policeman standing at the front door, his patrol car parked to block the driveway. You drive down the road to the local convenience store to find a crude OUT OF ORDER sign on the ATM machine, and the same CASH ONLY signs on their gas pumps. You dial your workplace to find out whats going on and get a recorded message saying that cell phone service has been temporarily suspended please try later. You head back home and try on your landline to reach your workplace. The call rings through on the fourth time you try, but there is no answer. You figure that there probably wont ever be an answer again. Now what?

You realize that you and your family now have to survive on whatever you have on hand at this moment for an indeterminate time period. Your bank account is inaccessible, and will remain so for some time. Your savings account is unreachable as well. Ditto for the three gold coins in your safe-deposit box. Your credit cards are useless. Your job may never return and your steady pay check every two weeks may be a thing of the past. When (or if) youre ever able to pull your money out of the bank, there may be a limit as to how much you are able to withdraw over a given time period, and the purchasing power of each dollar will probably be considerably less than it is today.

This isnt an improbable scenario. In 1933, the President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, declared a week-long bank holiday, raided safe-deposit boxes for gold coins, and devalued the dollar. Take credit cards, an ATM, and a cell phone out of the above scenario and youre back in time where the impossible actually happened in the USA. It can (and I believe it will) happen again, based on the worlds current economic situation, and the fact that the worlds currencies are all merely paper without backing of any kind.

My suggestion for the New Year: sit down with your spouse and children and paper and pencil and take a hard look at where you and your family would be in the above scenario. Then take what actions you can to improve your financial readiness. No, its not possible for everyone to have twenty gold eagles and $10,000 in cash tucked under the mattress. It is possible to go over your expenses, cut back where possible, sell stuff to raise cash, get cash out of your checking and savings accounts, empty and close your safe-deposit box, keep your car at least half full, and clip coupons to cut your food bill and still include an extra can or two for the pantry. In other words, pray for the best, prepare for the worst, and start the New Year off right."

 

[TheMartianChick]

In a scenario like the one depicted in the book, One Second After, I wouldn't advise bartering any ammo away. It could be used against you. I'd be willing to trade away things that were of no use to me or that I could reproduce like excess food or animals.

oh that's why they were trading .22's and keeping the heavy stuff for self defense.

Maybe so... but a well-placed shot from a 22 can still incapacitate you and/or kill you. In a situation where medical attention is scarce or non-existent, even a compound fracture in the leg can kill you by causing an infection. There are many ways to die...some are just faster than others. In the end, you still end up dead!


If someone doesn't have any ammo and they need to hunt for food, then they'd better learn to grow it, set snares for small game, go fishing or foraging.
(I swear, I'm not usually so darn negative!)

 

[Icu4dzs]

Britesea makes a number of excellent points with history to back up her assertions. Yes, friends and neighbors, it can and in all likelihood WILL happen again. As for the safedeposit box, I'm not sure I'd close it out because there are things that you might want to preserve that actually have no "cash value" but need to be protected, such as important documents, unreplaceable photographs, etc. Keeping spendable or valuable objects that could be "claimed by the gubmints dudes" might not be as good an idea and getting that stuff out of there is obviously a wise recommendation. Storing images of REALLY important documentation on a CD is a pretty good idea, too. That way you can have the CD reproduced and stored in a number of locations so that even if one bank burns down, you will still have proof of your documents.

As for taxes, if people don't have any money, taxes will be a bit harder to collect. Remember, the government of the United States is you and me. People working for us who do "bad things" will undoubtedly find that honest people take offense at such behaviors and won't stand for it. Stealing under the guise of working for the US Gov't is still stealing and we have the power as citizens of the US Gov't to stop such illegal behavior. No one should be intimidated by people working for the US Gov't.

Yes, taxes have a reason and should be paid, but if no one is paying taxes because there is no money, evicting you from your land isn't going to solve the problems either. People who can't pay their taxes will undoubtedly be in the "majority" vs. "minority" and those who own land still have the ability to do something to produce some form of payment for their taxes. Any government employee who thinks they will just go ahead and evict you from your land for non payment of taxes will have to find someone else to put on that land. Somehow, that will be fairly obvious as to what is going on and it won't take long before that behavior is found "undesirable" by the honest people of the United States. Even soldiers have to pay taxes and if they have no money, they won't pay taxes and won't work. If "soldiers" don't work, enforcing draconian style governmental controls will quickly fail.

As for her scenario, which quite frankly is probably just around the corner, and her suggestions to re-apportion your current assets in order to be able to pay taxes is quite sound and I agree. The issue is "where do you store that money"? If you keep it in the mattress, it will be no less safe from marauders but will earn about the same interest as it currently earns in a bank. Burying it will keep it safer, and again earn about the same interest but then the good news is that you will have it and raising taxes to an unsustainable level won't be an easy prospect. People can raise the price of goods and services but congress won't be able to raise the taxes all that quickly so having the cash as Britesea says (IMHO) is a good approach since that is the only thing that will the cash will be useful for most people. Providing goods and services will then be a function of your own self-sufficiency and that IS what we are all about here I thought.

YMMV
Trim sends

//BT//