Going Galt


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There is a new book out called Going Galt: Surviving Economic Armageddon and it is about surviving an emergency. Here's the summary from Amazon...

The United States of America is now bankrupt. It does not matter which political party will be in power over the next decades, the over-hang of $100 Trillion in unfunded liabilities from the local to Federal level, plus a hollow banking system, means there is no way to tax ourselves enough, or even cut spending enough, to have any chance to grow our way out of our problems. We are headed towards economic collapse.

What this means is that the productive elements of society will at some point go on strike, whether by choice or because they are forced to pack up their bags and hide. From Ayn Rand's famous novel Atlas Shrugged, comes the phrase "Who Is John Galt". Galt is the character who epitomizes the productive entrepreneur so fed up with the restrictions of the bureaucrats and corporatists that he decides to start a revolt of society's creators. In our current financial dilemma, Rand’s theme has lead to the suggestion that productive citizens may only be able to survive by "Going Galt" and dropping out.

But how does one survive if one drops out of society, even for a short period? That's what this book is about, how to survive the upcoming economic collapse everyone knows is coming. That doesn't mean you can avoid shopping for food at inflated prices, or make your own gasoline, or live in a bomb shelter; that isn't practical. Instead it means: You will have to take aggressive financial measures to protect your assets. It means you will want to grow some food if you can. It means you will have to stockpile food for when social and infrastructure problems arise. It means you will need to find power sources off the grid to supplement your fuel needs.

How do you do all these things? "Going Galt", gives you a starting point. What this book is not is anti-government, or anti-tax, those are armchair discussions for the idle class. What "Going Galt" is about is surviving No Matter What Happens.

About the Author

Daxton Brown is a mechanical engineer, commercial realtor and writer living in Las Vegas. He has worked on a number of startup business projects including a successful television station as well as a development project in Whampoa Garden, Hong Kong. In short, Daxton is well acquainted with the entrepreneurial ethic that made our country great. As everyone, he worries about the world we will leave our families and the younger generation. Because of his broad business and technical background, he joins many analysts in dismay over where America is headed financially, and has brought his expertise to bear writing on what individuals can do to survive the approaching storm. The result is "Going Galt: Surviving Economic Armageddon". He wishes all success in overcoming the rough waters that face us.

I've been reading the book on my Kindle and it is pretty good, giving much detail about what you would need to be prepared. He goes into all kind of detail about generators, weapons, water, etc. There is a first hand account about lessons from Katrina that is very interesting. If you want to hunker down for a year, this book will tell you what you need.

I will not be stockpiling a year's supply of stuff as he recommends, I simply do not have the space and I don't want to have an excuse for hoarding. I do, however, have a Red Cross emergency preparedness bag that came with the car to which I've added some stuff like warm socks, hat, change of clothes, toiletries, extra batteries, peanut butter and tools. Hopefully, I'll be fine until help arrives or the situation passes.

Are you doing anything to prepare for when the sh*t hits the fan???

What's in your bug-out bag?

Kat

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Great thread Kat:

Add a small bottle of bleach to your bag for water purification.

A small, but high magnification magnifying glass for lots of reasons, but you can start your fire with dry tinder and safe your matches for real emergencies.

As much dehydrated fruit, veggies and meat for a week is a good idea[light - efficient].

More later.

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Harry Browne and his imitators were pushing this line forty years ago. The bomb-shelter fad of the early sixties played to the same sentiments, as did Y2K and (in California) earthquake preparedeness. I've even read that the approach of Y1K inspired similar preparations in Europe. Disasters on that scale are quite capricious, and K rations and a bag of silver dimes won't help you if the going gets tough. That's why I've never paid much attention to such advice.

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Thanks for the tips. I think I will take another trip out to the American Science and Surplus store, it's a great little geeky store in Chicago where you can find all kinds of stuff. I picked up a few things there last week like the saw wire, credit card survival tool, and whistle survival tool. I should go and pick up a magnifier and dropper bottle for bleach and some other small items.

Kat

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Thanks for the tips. ... the saw wire, credit card survival tool, and whistle survival tool. I should go and pick up a magnifier and dropper bottle for bleach and some other small items.

I keep stuff like that in a couple of gym bags, and my security duty kit. I do have to nod to Peter Reidy, though. Just to say that it was not Harry Browne who led that movement 40 years ago. He was more realistic in his expectations. But, yes, having worked twice for Loompanics and written for them - half a dozen major essays and maybe a hundred book reviews - I know the literature well and the theory behind it. In fact, I met Linda and Morris Tannehill in 1972 specifically because they were intending to build a retreat community as they expected society to collapse at any minute.

The 1970s were a wild time with Nixon and Carter, the defeat in Viet Nam, and nearly a civil war in the streets - the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King only presaging the attempt on Gov. Wallace in 1972, then the Simbionese Liberation Front; Weathermen bombings; the massacre of MOVE in Philadelphia; inflation running rampant in the USA and globally, of course, precious metals running up, gasoline shortages, petroleum crises, and then the Iran Hostage Crisis, while the US automotive industry imploded under the invasion from Japan, the UAW smashing Japanese cars for TV cameras ... those were wild times.

And yet here we are.

You could say that like the parachutist with a failure, we feel great all the down.

I don't see the end of the world or anything like it coming any time soon.

However, it is good to be prepared, always, no matter what, because life can be grand for everyone when you face a life-threatening emergency. Our community college had wilderness survival classes and some of the science nerds took them for fun. That worked out well when a couple of them with their kid went for a walk and ended up spending the night in the woods because they got turned around.

When I was an active flyer, one night my flight instructor and I were to meet at the local airstrip and when we got there after closing, we found that our plane had not been fueled. I looked around... And when I got home I put a few more things in my flight bag. Depending on how far I thought I was flying, I carried extra stuff like matches, candles - magnifiers are easy for a numismatist - bandages, water, food bars ...

About that same time - 1999 or so - the company I worked for had a series of "team building" exercises. One of them, we were supposed to be coming home from "South America" when our plane is downed in a storm "somewhere in the Caribbean." The pilot is killed. The plane is wrecked. We six survived. This is what we have in cargo - tourist crap, basically - and we six all have to come out alive together to win the game.

One team gave up and just settled in permanently where they were.

Myself, I argued for pouring out the rum and throwing away the gun and bullets, but no one else on my team

saw the problem.

One team left behind the big Christmas candle but took the golf clubs - they thought they could build a fire anywhere in a jungle and were going to use the clubs to kill small game.

A few years later, working in security, a few of us were standing around and the subject of duty bags came up. What do you carry? We all had our own wilderness survival kits. Our supervisor broke up laughing. "If anything like 9/11 happens again, you are not going to be caught in the desert: you are going to be trapped in an elevator." Now I carry a 6-inch pry bar.

Read about Hurricane Katrina. Or the Tsunamis. It is not so much what you carry, but how quickly you decide to leave. When my wife and I were finishing our BSes, we both took a law enforcement class in Terrorism for First Responders. Radioactive germs or whatever, the best defense is to leave the area. Bottom line.

Edited by Michael E. Marotta
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Thanks for the tips. ... the saw wire, credit card survival tool, and whistle survival tool. I should go and pick up a magnifier and dropper bottle for bleach and some other small items.

I keep stuff like that in a couple of gym bags, and my security duty kit. I do have to nod to Peter Reidy, though. Just to say that it was not Harry Browne who led that movement 40 years ago. He was more realistic in his expectations. But, yes, having worked twice for Loompanics and written for them - half a dozen major essays and maybe a hundred book reviews - I know the literature well and the theory behind it. In fact, I met Linda and Morris Tannehill in 1972 specifically because they were intending to build a retreat community as they expected society to collapse at any minute.

The 1970s were a wild time with Nixon and Carter, the defeat in Viet Nam, and nearly a civil war in the streets - the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King only presaging the attempt on Gov. Wallace in 1972, then the Simbionese Liberation Front; Weathermen bombings; the massacre of MOVE in Philadelphia; inflation running rampant in the USA and globally, of course, precious metals running up, gasoline shortages, petroleum crises, and then the Iran Hostage Crisis, while the US automotive industry imploded under the invasion from Japan, the UAW smashing Japanese cars for TV cameras ... those were wild times.

And yet here we are.

You could say that like the parachutist with a failure, we feel great all the down.

I don't see the end of the world or anything like it coming any time soon.

However, it is good to be prepared, always, no matter what, because life can be grand for everyone when you face a life-threatening emergency. Our community college had wilderness survival classes and some of the science nerds took them for fun. That worked out well when a couple of them with their kid went for a walk and ended up spending the night in the woods because they got turned around.

When I was an active flyer, one night my flight instructor and I were to meet at the local airstrip and when we got there after closing, we found that our plane had not been fueled. I looked around... And when I got home I put a few more things in my flight bag. Depending on how far I thought I was flying, I carried extra stuff like matches, candles - magnifiers are easy for a numismatist - bandages, water, food bars ...

About that same time - 1999 or so - the company I worked for had a series of "team building" exercises. One of them, we were supposed to be coming home from "South America" when our plane is downed in a storm "somewhere in the Caribbean." The pilot is killed. The plane is wrecked. We six survived. This is what we have in cargo - tourist crap, basically - and we six all have to come out alive together to win the game.

One team gave up and just settled in permanently where they were.

Myself, I argued for pouring out the rum and throwing away the gun and bullets, but no one else on my team

saw the problem.

One team left behind the big Christmas candle but took the golf clubs - they thought they could build a fire anywhere in a jungle and were going to use the clubs to kill small game.

A few years later, working in security, a few of us were standing around and the subject of duty bags came up. What do you carry? We all had our own wilderness survival kits. Our supervisor broke up laughing. "If anything like 9/11 happens again, you are not going to be caught in the desert: you are going to be trapped in an elevator." Now I carry a 6-inch pry bar.

Read about Hurricane Katrina. Or the Tsunamis. It is not so much what you carry, but how quickly you decide to leave. When my wife and I were finishing our BSes, we both took a law enforcement class in Terrorism for First Responders. Radioactive germs or whatever, the best defense is to leave the area. Bottom line.

The Mormons have evolved a very good set of practical rules for living temporarily cut off from a commercial supply of food and other goods. You might want to see the Mormon "survival manual".

Ba'al Chatzaf

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Ba'al Chatzaf wrote:

The Mormons have evolved a very good set of practical rules for living temporarily cut off from a commercial supply of food and other goods. You might want to see the Mormon "survival manual".

end quote

Good advice and thanks to Kat for bringing this up.

And I agree wth Michael about being quick when disaster occurs. The first out of town avoid the stomping feet of Godzilla.

Kat says she does not have the space for a Mormon Closet, and that is tough. I keep thinking about putting shelving in one of my daughter's empty rooms but I have yet to do it. So our one food closet and three or four cabinets are full of stuff.

If Mitt did become President I bet he would push the idea of self-sufficiency.

Peter Taylor

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If Mitt did become President I bet he would push the idea of self-sufficiency.

Peter Taylor

Off all the religious groups in the U.S. the Mormons (Church of Latter Day Saints) push the idea of self sufficiency the hardest. They appear to be the least sympathetic to a redistribution state and government handouts.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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Ba'al Chatzaf wrote:

Off all the religious groups in the U.S. the Mormons (Church of Latter Day Saints) push the idea of self sufficiency the hardest. They appear to be the least sympathetic to a redistribution state and government handouts.

End quote

If you watch the HBO show "Big Love," you will know that they do a lot of very rational things, and have such beautiful 1950's sounding music in their culture, but their religion is debilitating at some levels. Their system of young men who they call "elders" becoming missionaries to places like Africa, Arabia, and North Korea is a waste of young lives. Still, if I were seeking a religious ally it would be the Mormons over the Amish or the pacifistic "Friends".

I was sitting here playing internet scrabble and listening to Fox News. A women economist who predicted the 2007 crash better than anyone has predicted a crisis in America in one month. I did not catch her name.

Fox said that this June will be a flashpoint when city governments redo their budgets. The worst example is Milwaukee which pays two billion dollars a year, which they don't have, to retired teachers. Vote the Dems in and they will vote you an unsustainable amount of retirement. Milwaukee will need to lay off 500 working teachers to make their budget. No one on Wall Street will want to risk lending them money.

Other cities and states will be redoing their budgets this June so expect defaults and bankruptcies. They have been artificially sustained by "stimulus money," which has now run out. A cascade affect will occur that will sweep across America, and then the globe. If this June's flashpoint does not set off a depression and default then the next crisis will.

Walter Williams, economist emeritus at George Mason University had an interesting column last week. Due to a bad economy and the minimum wage laws the unemployment rate is around 50 percent among the unskilled especially young black men, and not just in the cities. The single parent family, welfare system, and gangsta culture has taught them to never crack a book. Many cannot read.

My wife was thinking about taking our granddaughter to a nice park with swings and rides in a nearby, small city, which is next to a black neighborhood. I went to reconnoiter around 2 in the afternoon last week, and saw a lot of young, lone black men and others in groups, around the park and even one guy on an old girl's bicycle.

Caesar:

Let me have men about me that are fat,

Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look,

He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.

Julius Caesar Act 1, scene 2, 190–195

I nixed the park unless I was with them.

Ba'al, you and all Objectivists should do the bare minimum to live after the crash. . . . unless stagflation happens instead, which is another plausible scenario. Do the least, whatever that may be, and then consider doing more. Peter Reidy's "What me worry, I will be dead anyway," attitude is not rational. We are three missed meals away from anarchy.

Petey! Turn off that Rachmaninoff. Listening to the Bee Gee's "Stayin' Alive" might put you into the proper state of mind : o )

Peter Taylor

Edited by Peter Taylor
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The Mormons have evolved a very good set of practical rules for living temporarily cut off from a commercial supply of food and other goods. You might want to see the Mormon "survival manual".

Ba'al Chatzaf

Yes, it has served seven or eight generations of Latter Day Saints who survived repeated rolling waves of collapsing civilization. Every time Salt Lake City was cut off, they hunkered down and ate their stored foods. When commercial society was in hiatus, they productively kept up those genealogies so that all their ancestors could meet them in heaven, thus also keeping their clerical skills sharp for when civilization came back (temporarily).

Look, when we travel "up north" to visit my wife's family, I make sure that we have some "survival gear" in the car. MREs, knives, candles, band-aids. You get a flat tire at midnight 20 miles between Clare and Cadillac where your cellphone has one bar, and you might not see help for a while. Once, I showed my kit to another patrol officer and she said, "All you have is stuff for yourself. I carry stuff for other people, too." So, I added a reflective vest, hard hards, a extra flashlight, etc., etc. On the theory that if I came upon an overturned semi or something, I could flash a badge and be helpful, if only by diverting traffic. I got certified in FEMA Response, also. A lot of America is uninhabited or thinly populated. Here in Michigan, once you cross north of an arbitrary line across the state from Bay City to Grand Rapids, it's like the 19th century. And that's only half the state. There's another half, the Upper Peninsula, where Paul Bunyan wrestles sasquatch -- when the snow's not too deep for them both... So, yes, it is important to be prepared.

Short of that, though, emergencies are emergencies. That's why we call them emergencies. Otherwise we would call them "yet again today."

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Milwaukee will need to lay off 500 working teachers to make their budget. No one on Wall Street will want to risk lending them money. ... Other cities and states will be redoing their budgets this June so expect defaults and bankruptcies. They have been artificially sustained by "stimulus money," which has now run out. A cascade affect will occur that will sweep across America, and then the globe. If this June's flashpoint does not set off a depression and default then the next crisis will.

Then what? Hordes of former school teachers rush from the collapsing cities to loot the foods in the countryside like locusts?

It does not happen like that. And it has happened before. During the Great Depression, cities created their own scrip, payable in whatever the city had to offer. Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce created it, paying people to do "community work" like parks, streams, and roads. In Lansing, the city paid its employees in scrip good for paying household bills to the city-owned Board of Water and Light. There were thousands of these local moneys created. They served a need, then were retired. Read aboutDepression Scrip here. They knew to do that in 1933 because in 1907, when there was yet another burst bubble in banking, the banks created their own "Clearinghouse Scrip" to make do until the markets reorganized.

One day a few weeks back, I was waiting for a bus and the nearby pizza place had a perpetual sale running and their sign needed a decimal point. Medium One Topping $899. And I wondered how long it would be before pizza was $900 which meant people would make $1000 per hour common wage. See, I have an envelope of world paper money labeled "Googols." A googol is 10^100 (invented by the nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner c. 1940.) Some of it is Serbian/Yugoslavian. But some is Turkish. They lost two world wars but kept the same currency. Italy and Japan had the same problem. Before Japan conquered Asia, the silver Yen was the same size as a silver Dollar and the gold Yen was like a gold Dollar. Conquering Asia and losing World War II made the 1000-yen note like our ten dollar bill. The point is that the government of the USA still has a lot of margin.

Ignorant conservatives talk about Germany's inflation of the 1920s as if it were causeless or capricious. The German mark lost all value because the Allies took their gold to pay for World War One. The USA lent the UK 250 million ounces of silver to pay off Indian princes so they would not revolt while England was weak. Then, in 1921, the UK paid it back. Where did the UK get the money from? Even so, it was only the German government that was broke. The people still had the same assets and liabilities. So, they created "Notgeld" (not = need; geld = money <-yield: i.e., necessity money). German notgeld was highly artistic, which indicates production abilities, both from the creators, but also the producers. It was widespread. Thousands of types are known. Also, like us, the German people had silver and gold coins. They just preferred not to spend them unless they had to.

I believe in being prepared for emergencies (see above) but it is not the end of the world, even if all the governments all at once default on all their debts. Governments do not create wealth. They are financially irrelevant. They just churn dollars - and a lot of thoe get shredded in the wash - but nothing much else happens... or will.

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Well I just hope everyone is darned good and ready cuz apparently the world is ending tomorrow. We shall see what we shall see.... Does this end of the world stuff even apply to atheists?

Kat

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Well I just hope everyone is darned good and ready cuz apparently the world is ending tomorrow. We shall see what we shall see.... Does this end of the world stuff even apply to atheists?

The sun is about to peek over the lush vegetation of my little cul-de-sac, and the scent of lilacs is in the air. I feel a little bit of rapture. Does that count?

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Well I just hope everyone is darned good and ready cuz apparently the world is ending tomorrow. We shall see what we shall see.... Does this end of the world stuff even apply to atheists?

The sun is about to peek over the lush vegetation of my little cul-de-sac, and the scent of lilacs is in the air. I feel a little bit of rapture. Does that count?

No. Unless you're experiencing that feeling in the clouds.

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I suggest a couple of week's supply of food and medicine so you don't have to ever go shopping when everybody else does fighting over what's left over in the store temporarily disconnected from normal resupplies.

--Brant

food, water, ammo, guns!--extra women!

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What does a footlocker full of canned soup buy, half a week? Not sure what that accomplishes.

Actually, quite a bit more, depending on how big your family is. Figure one can per meal per person. You can vary that and you will need to add other stuff, but you can fit a lot in a kitchen cupboard, powdered milk, dried fruit, nuts.

Whether or not the world ends, I do stay mindful of planned emergencies. In the winter, in the midwest, you can be snowed in for a couple of days, maybe without power, also. This past winter, after Thanksgiving, I bought an extra bag of charcoal briquettes for the outdoor grill. Staying warm without power is a different problem, of course. The flooding now along the Mississippi is another kind of predictable emergency.

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In the event that the U.S. dollar loses its World Reserve Currency status, which may be the proximate cause of the collapse of the economy, prices will move substantially higher. If the response to that is government price controls on food, the result would likely be shortages as farmers stop producing. The civil unrest that might ensue might last several months. Fuel and energy would be affected as well. Even water might be involved.

I suggest you go to www.chrismartenson.com site and explore the discussions there regarding all these matters and ways to deal with each of them. It might be helpful to alert your neighbors too so they can be more prepared and less likely to be knocking on your door if things really get tough.

Beware the normalcy bias syndrome in which you cannot believe it can happen here. The example given of that syndrome is that many Jewish people in Germany could not believe things would get any worse even after many were being beaten or taken away. Many failed to leave the country when they had the chance.

It is hard to believe things could get so bad here as you find store shelves bursting with goods and produce, electricity and water and fuel are abundant as well but remain vulnerable if a collapse occurs.

I wonder how I will get to work, how I will protect our home if I do go to work, how to persuade my wife to buy supplies as she thinks I am too negative and pessimistic. I wonder how I will be able to rescue my son and his family from New York City if all hell breaks loose.

Easier to make believe there is no way thinks will get to be that bad. That would be a mistake.

www.chrismartenson.com

Here is a link to an interview with John Williams founder of Shadowstats.com on his views of impending Hyperinflation:

http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2011/5/20_John_Williams_Exclusive_-_Hyperinflation_%26_US_Dollar_Collapse.html

You will also find it at www.kingworldnews.com

Edited by gulch8
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Well I just hope everyone is darned good and ready cuz apparently the world is ending tomorrow. We shall see what we shall see.... Does this end of the world stuff even apply to atheists?

Kat

I plan to be at a buffet here in town during the world's end.

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Well I just hope everyone is darned good and ready cuz apparently the world is ending tomorrow. We shall see what we shall see.... Does this end of the world stuff even apply to atheists?

Kat

I plan to be at a buffet here in town during the world's end.

Well, then you do not have to worry about a doggie bag!

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Gulch8 wrote:

Beware the normalcy bias syndrome in which you cannot believe it can happen here.

end quote

Do the minimum, if nothing else.

Remember all the stories about what a dollar or a nickle used to buy? We now think it nomal that a car cost 1200 bucks in 1962 and twenty times that today. This fiscal insanity is not sustainable.

Peter

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