Too Late, It’s Here

Technically speaking, we are already in economic collapse. We have been for some time, but it’s not always obvious when something like this starts rolling. Don’t let your imagination run away with you. As I’ve explained in the past, our situation does not lend itself to a sudden total collapse. The meaning of the term “economic collapse” refers to a slow-down or stop in economic exchange. Because of the sheer size our national economy, a complete stop is not even possible. And slow-downs have come and gone for various reasons, so you can never be sure that once we start to slide, it will keep sliding, nor how far.

Right now, it’s virtually guaranteed it’s going to slide a long, long way. The current system is dying, and there is an awful lot that must be replaced with a different way of doing things. And I’ve already said it won’t be the same everywhere. Here in Oklahoma, we are doing rather well. Other parts of the country are already in pain, and getting worse. I doubt anyone is in a position to estimate with any precision what it will look like or feel like for us little people. All I can offer are broad generalities.

But I haven’t changed my advice for those of us near the bottom. Keep some canned goods, and if you can afford it, a stocked freezer. Granted, you may be like me, with no significant storage space for the prepper kind of thing. Still, the whole point is not to survive as if in isolation, but to ride out the rough spots as the system changes.

What we should expect to see are sudden closures of stores. In this atmosphere, the businesses that are going to close will decide far in advance but they will flatly refuse to tell their customers. They don’t give a damn about you. You’ll need a small stock to get past these sudden closures while you search for alternative suppliers. The whole economy will not simply shut down all at once. Some specific types of items will disappear for decades, but the basic needs will be available for most consumers within a reasonable distance from home.

The bigger problem will be the drop in quality against the rise in price. Can you imagine your local Dollar General suddenly being the only store open with highly inflated prices for what they sell? The biggest unseen terror here is the collapse of our transportation network. It’s not that transport will be unavailable, but that costs will soar, causing demand to fall. And when the volume drops, shippers shut down. Some will be smart enough to scale back and keep operating best they can, but too many are in no financial position to do that. They are over their heads in commitments. It will take awhile for someone to replace what they do on a smaller scale. There will be an initial friction when one part of the system breaks, before someone else can fill that smaller demand.

Too much of what we have been doing in the past is fragile. In the effort to squeeze every last bit of profit from the system, everyone went to the “just-in-time” delivery system. That requires a great many players cooperating at a break-neck pace. A more robust and reliable system would have been priced out of business, so there’s no one doing things that way. The fragile system is all there is, and if any one participant closes down, the whole thing screeches to a halt. It’s the interconnected system that makes the most money, but is also very fragile.

And it’s no secret that this collapse is engineered by people who have their hands on some really big economic levers. Their plans are to make us terribly miserable and wholly dependent. Miserable we will be, but dependency is very hard to enforce. For decades our ruling elite forced a centralization through policies in both government and banking. But they have gambled on making us blind to our options, and it’s not working that well. The bulk of the population believes those lies, but the distance to discovering that they are lies is not as far as the rulers had hoped. The blindness is not permanent. But it is still blindness, and there will be a tremendous friction as the population slowly begins to see again.

And yes, there will be a portion of the population who refuse to see. In other words, there are too many variables and we cannot predict what will happen for any of us as individuals. The only hope we have is faith to walk by our convictions and the fortitude to face what comes.