How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Recession
September 30, 2008
As the markets collapse and we all fear for our life savings, jobs, and homes I’ve been putting some thought into the concepts and potential results of the bailout.
It seems to me that injecting $7.00×10^11 into the economy of the Democratic Peoples Republic of America(DPRA) is not going to amount to anything for the average hard working, tax paying, citizen. In the end, other then give a big bag of money to the assholes that screwed us over, what is the real result. The answer is nothing.
The investment banks are cash poor as, apparently, MBAs are not taught about the importance of cash flow. On top of that, it would seem that many companies finance their payroll and overhead through loans, possibly the worst thing a small business can do. We’re all being told that, unless we taxpayers bail out these sons of bitches, the economy will spiral into complete decay.
I say, let it happen.
We’ve been sucking at the teat of easy credit and fallacious economic policy for too long and, I’ll admit, I’ve taken my share. Enough is enough. We cannot continue basing our economy on pushing fictitious dollars around.
As such, I feel that we need to experience a depression in this generation. A complete collapse of the economy to remind us of what’s important.
After taking stock of my life, I realized yesterday it doesn’t matter what happens. What really matters, is that there is somewhere to go back to.
The most important thing, is to play out the scenario of what will happen when it’s all gone. Do you have a place to go home to that is owned by your family? This means family farms, homesteads, plot’s of land you can call your own. A place you can grow some vegetables, raise some livestock, or hunt for meat. A place that you can subsist regardless of money, power, or public utilities.
In my circumstances, should the worst occur, that place is the 90 acres of my childhood home in extreme Northern Minnesota. In the end I know that the land and water shall provide, and I can keep my family comfortable, warm, and fed as we wait out the systemic collapse of our economy.
September 30, 2008 at 9:08 am
Well said.
September 30, 2008 at 10:18 am
I’m totally with you. Except the only thing my parents own between them and have entitlement to is a tiny sailboat and an early 90s purple nissan pickup truck.
I don’t own anything.
If I don’t marry into some land and money soon, I’m completely screwed. It’s like the 19th century all over again.
October 2, 2008 at 10:49 am
A true statement completely, except the irony in that it probably costs a ton of money to own such land, doesn’t it?? So how does one simply grab a piece of fresh exspensive vast chunk of pristine land to survive the next Great Depression when people can hardly afford to even own a nice middle class apartment these days?
October 2, 2008 at 11:08 am
Agreed. That’s why it’s necessary to go back to old times in which families relied on each-other. I don’t own my house outright. I’m mortgaged to the hilt. I’ve got to rely on family land.
On another note, it’s not too bad these days to pick up some land in the woods. Land that is not developed for agriculture or residential property tends to go quite cheap when you get a few hundred miles from a major metro.
You can always get together with a few family members and pick up a 40 acre plot somewhere in the middle of no-where.
October 4, 2008 at 5:56 pm
All biological systems, are dependent on energy inputs, whether they are autotrophs harvesting the sun, or heterotrophs harvesting autotrophs. In our modern society it’s easy to forget how important food and water are.
I grew up in a refugee camp after WW II. Even if you had money, you couldn’t buy many of the essentials of life. A dominant memory of my childhood is of every square inch of ground that wasn’t a path was turned into a garden. No food was wasted. Scraps were taken to our extended family’s animal pens where, together, we raised and shared pigs, chickens and geese. I remember fall slaughtering. It was a noisy, bloody, communal affair.
You don’t need a lot of land. But many of the skills needed for living independently now reside in fewer and fewer people. During the Great Depression, Americans were still primarily rural and had survival skills. Today that is not the case.
The collapse of the financial banking system (not only in the U.S. — read about Iceland) in such a short period of time is indicative of the behavior of a chaotic system, where inputs have amplifying outputs. I think it’s safe to say that classical economic theory has not been a terribly accurate predictor of real life economic behavior.
The land Janos is talking about, we bought in 1991 for $32,000. It came with house (needing major work, namely a new foundation), a barn (falling down), and several outbuildings. Because it had a non-functioning septic system, it was not possible to get a bank loan to buy it. I was farming at the time, and I had enough cash flow to be able to pay cash for it. We still don’t have a septic system. The outhouse works just fine. We recently trenched in a gravity flow drain so we’re not dependent on electricity to empty the sump. The point is to keep it simple.