Immediate Failure

Brandon Smith paints a nightmare scenario regarding Central Bank Digital Currencies. You aren’t likely to find a more accurate and readable explanation of how it will work. What Smith won’t tell you is how it will fail. Just at the point when this awful evil centralized power reaches its crescendo, it will fracture into a jillion shards.

It’s in the nature of the thing. The barriers government will raise will simply spawn a massive underground economy. Granted, with a bad social score and your official currency access locked, there are things you won’t be able to do. However, it will be only temporary, because there simply is not enough enforcement manpower to prevent people building an alternative market for the things they refuse to do without.

Have you noticed how well law enforcement is doing with squelching the drug trade? It’s only a niche market, as it is with all vices, and yet people are still getting high, and the suppliers are getting filthy rich. Now imagine a far larger underground market in basic survival goods and services. There simply is no way to control human behavior on that scale in the current context.

As noted previously, if you would like to survive in the future, start now gathering the things you will need to function. What should you expect? First would be a much higher percentage of poverty. The cost of living will rise and push the poverty line much higher, so that a greater portion of the population will be “poor”. Much of the current economic activity will slow down. A lot of small businesses will disappear, eventually replaced with an informal market.

This is a good time to get your teeth fixed or have any other essential surgeries. It may be ten or twenty years before the market for that opens back up. Buy hand powered tools you know how to use. Don’t plan on having access to a strong vehicle maintenance market; it will be more like parts of the world where people keep driving stuff that’s falling apart, barely moving on its own power. It’s a good time to invest in alternative transport, things powered by muscle (human or animal). It is most certainly not a good time to go with e-vehicles.

Electrical power, where it still exists, will be outrageously expensive. If you absolutely have to use it, invest in alternative means of generation. It’s a very good time to learn how to repair any sort of thing people are likely to keep using. Even better, learn how to repair stuff in general. You’ll always have work. Learn how to make things work with a very minimal of replacement of parts, or how to keep them working on rigged up bits and pieces you can get your hands on.

Learn how to move stuff that people are going to want moved to another place. What can’t be moved will need to be replicated another way. Think about how that can be done. Watch a few videos of how people in low income countries get by. Don’t try to imagine ideal social structures; wait to see what forms once the system comes apart. Think about ways to build for what arises.

In America in particular, clothing is a very big issue, in that it currently is not an issue at all. Our current consumption depends almost entirely on cheap imports. Nothing has to last very long because its cheap to replace. What will people wear when that market disappears? What happens with synthetic fabrics and injection molded foam disappears from the shelves? They will. Virtually none of that stuff can be repaired. Try to imagine how folks lived before mass produced fabrics and shoes. In some places, it will be like that until the old systems long abandoned are restarted.

Salvage will keep things going for a long time. Learn how to reuse discarded stuff.

We’ll have to learn all over again how to eat. We will rediscover the joy of making from scratch, and taking whatever we can get our hands on as the scratch we use. Again, imports will die, so anything that isn’t locally produced, or cannot be locally produced, will be mostly unavailable, at least for a while. The trade and transport system will have to be rebuilt from scratch.

This is where you start to pray for your state and local governments, that they will be ready to pick up the slack. Pray that your state and local officials are ready to secede from the federal government, if not officially, then in practice. They have to be ready to enable and manage the economy without the federal provisions. What you can’t provide locally, you’ll do without: banking, currency, exchange of funds, basic life support, etc.

If you go by the likes of Brandon Smith, that new life in a decentralized economy may be here in the next few years. The idiots are convinced they can make this total control happen, and they are already putting things in place. And it will fail almost immediately. Meanwhile, you can keep an eye on the progress of things for now, because public Internet access is critical to the plan, but it will become ever more a walled garden of limited access.