A reality check about a potential Great Depression

When you study history, you get a better in depth look at the events that shaped that period, and then you can often see other periods in history in which similar events occurred. When you do that, you cannot help but notice that often people respond in much in the same manner despite their cultural differences.

Now a lot of people are assuming that when the next Great Depression fully occurs, that it's immediate dog-eat-dog, and my personal sense of that is that while it's plausible, I don't think that this will happen.

It's true, that people long ago had more agrarian knowledge and pioneer skills. As a result of already living in a somewhat frugal manner, but losing their life savings, they had to tighten their belts (literally something that's done to feel less hunger), and began growing more food, taking terrible jobs, and trading and bartering instead of taking cash.

Now today, post-FDR, we have a huge amount of government aid. People have become used to the government always finding a way to give to the people in order to acquire votes. As such, people most often expect that the government will come to the rescue, and it's possible that this will happen. The price of such government assistance may be horrific in the long term, but in the short term will keep some people alive.

No government will deliberately allow the electricity, natural gas, and water infrastructure to go belly up. Doing that will certainly mean mass riots as most people have no ability to cope for long term electrical disconnection. However what's far worse is simply no water, as any reader of my posts will consider the enormous difficulty and health risks of a lack of drinking water, much less hygiene.

What might happen is a slow decline of government services and an inability to pay government aid. As the government goes bankrupt, people will purchase progressively cheaper and cheaper food and/or eat less.

Naturally in such an event, many people will lose their homes, but we haven't seen massive foreclosures allowed to progress at any time in history. It's possible the banks could foreclose on the homes in order to have some sense of assets, but they also owe money all over to the Federal Reserve as well as depositors. I highly doubt that the government would bail out the banks and then use soldiers in order to repossess homes. That's about what would have to happen as municipalities couldn't afford to pay their police or sheriffs. The alternative would be private security hired to foreclose, but still they have to pay them something.

What might happen is a complete breakdown of medicines and medical care, and as a result a huge amount of deaths within the first couple of months. Then we'd see malnutrition and outright starvation, and as they happened with have tremendous riots. Even during the Great Depression, sometimes farmers and citizens demanded food benefits of some kind, and vouchers were given for minimal food and seeds for gardens.

We're a spoiled people, used to tremendous abundance, and this is the most worrying aspect of people dealing with a Great Depression event. Sure a lot of people might riot and loot and temporarily fill their bellies or steal items. What then? As all of these stores restock constantly to save money on inventory costs, there won't be any further shipments.

What's more likely is city officials might commandeer store items with temporary vouchers. By seizing control of the inventories, the officials have control versus the items being looted. I would expect this to occur as federal officials pass along their tacit approval to do so. What's troubling is who would get this food or supplies?

This past year, if you've been reading along, there's seldom been any mention of using weapons or even hunting techniques. I hope you're researching that kind of thing independently as it's such a political hot potato. I'm more interesting in teaching you ways to cope based upon tried and true methods used on the American prairie and homesteaders as they expanded Westward. I've also deliberately given you modern methods utilized in 3rd world nations for digging wells and water purification too. Together, I hope that you've gleaned enough skills or at least whetted your appetite to learn more.

Real wealth ultimate comes from producing, harvesting, foraging, and growing items. It comes from being able to own land and build a home on it with your own two hands. It comes from creating items from cobbled materials and then trading them too. Somewhere along the way, we lost sight of this, and now we'll have to go through a period of adjustment to re-learn how to do all those things. Unless you live in a country devoid of natural resources, you still have the ability to create things or grow them.

The harsh reality is that Mother Nature provides, as well as the Source, but we have too many people living in concentrated areas that cannot realistically provide enough timber, rock, food, game animals or livestock, etc. They'll be movements of people out of the concentrated metropolises into what few rural areas remain. Even that will be very difficult as many people don't have skills and so they'll eek out a subsistence level for a period and probably die as they can't learn fast enough to prosper.

Many people may decide to literally dig a hole in the ground and support it with a wooden skeleton and live in the National Forests. I highly suspect a lot of people will attempt to do so. Even if they did, they'd eat all the game quickly. There's not enough any more, not by a long shot.

Yes, the crap may hit the fan, but most likely it'll be a terrible decade of struggling, lots of deaths, starvation, and failure to cope. I'd expect a lot of deaths from deliberate or unintentional causes through that process. Sometimes people can't cope and during the Depression, men took off and abandoned their families. Sometimes the parents died and there were a lot of orphans.

Yes, we may enter another world war, as that did ramp up industry during WWII. It's plausible, but we live in a post-nuclear world now. The consequences of a major offensive on multiple fronts will be completely new. What's also plausible is a military coup d'etat, a frightening idea that might happen from such bedlam. Even if that occurred, you'd have little ability to feed people...only soldiers. The military is NOT a police force, and so just as we've seen terrible abuse in the 21 Century, we'll see far worse if this happens.

I can definitely see people electing to enter government controlled facilities to manufacture and live in exchange for goods and services. I shudder at the thought.

After the loss of market confidence, many wealth folks bought up assets for pennies on the dollar. That will happen again for those with hard assets.The concentration of wealth in such a world may be as intense as the time of the Roman empire and far exceeding any kind of feudalism.

The antidote to all of that is life skills. I hope that somehow a few of you may survive because you took some of this to heart.