Some Thoughts on Economic Collapse
You may listen to the podcast version of this essay here.
Dear privacy seekers,
You might be asking what economic collapse has to do with privacy. In short, it has everything to do with it.
Privacy is about hiding, but it’s also about self-sufficiency, protection, about escaping the various centralized systems that by definition must know things about us. When an economy collapses, you’ll need privacy more than ever. And you’ll wish that you had pursued it ahead of time.
Before we get to privacy techniques, let facts be submitted to a candid world. The economy is the US and many other countries has in many respects never been in worse shape. Global debt among governments, and especially in the West has reached extraordinary levels. $300 trillion dollars worldwide. Wrap your head around that for a moment.
In other words, many more currency units have been printed and/or spent than actual economic growth created. There is also serious debt among ordinary people, especially in debt-fueled societies like the United States where credit cards and loans are the norm. This has been happening for decades, and its origin is in the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. It was around this time that the US dollar and other fiat government currencies were decoupled from gold, which meant that governments had free reign to print money for themselves. There was now no restraint, since having a currency tied to gold at least meant that expansion of the money supply was tied to a finite object that had to be mined.
This was a turning point. Governments could now enrich themselves at the expense of ordinary people. Think about this. When you put one more dollar into circulation, the dollars of everyone else lose a bit of value, because now you have more dollars competing for the same amount of goods. This is called inflation: the expansion of the currency supply, which inevitably leads to higher prices.
Since around 1913 99% of the value of a US dollar has been erased. The dollar has lost 99% of its value compared to gold. Other fiat currencies are comparable, if not worse.
In other words, governments and central banks have sucked 99% of the wealth of people out of their financial arteries in a sweeping vampiric motion over the last century. The people responsible will never be punished—they make the laws. And they’re retire and escape in luxury.
John Maynard Keynes, an economist who is as culpable in all of this as anyone ironically once said that: "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." The study of economics creates the manuals by which true wealth is stripped from the world and called “sound monetary policy.”
Here’s another statistic: The US dollars printed in 2020 represent 35% of all dollars printed in the totality of history up to that point. What do you think the trend of inflation will be?
In the history of the world no government currency has ever survived inflation. The Zimbabwe government printed so much money a couple of decades ago that it led to a hyperinflation that in the end was producing $100 trillion notes. You can still buy these as a reminder of the life cycle of government currencies. The ancient Romans lasted for hundreds of years until the silver denarius—at one point accepted from Scotland to India—was stripped of nearly all of its silver content by greedy politicians. This economic perversion contributed to the death of the Roman Empire, which led to a thousand years of intellectual and economic stagnation and regression in Europe: The Dark Ages.
Fast forward to the present moment. January 2022. Turn on a mainstream news source and you might see how the stock market is chugging along. New cryptocurrency millionaires surge daily. People don’t even really have to work anymore. Besides a few correctable supply chain issues, the economy is fine.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Let’s take a peek behind the curtain. Prices are rising. 7% in the US so far this year for living supplies and that’s based on corrupt statistics gathering; it’s likely much higher. Oil prices are rising. Housing prices are rising. Lumber and lithium prices are out of control. This is just a sampling. Stock prices and crypto prices are skyrocketing because people feel like they have to gamble to stay ahead. Or simply because cheap money breeds gambling. Tesla, the vehicle company, has a stock market cap so large that it equals the next highest 10 car companies combined. That includes Toyota, Honda, and Volkswagon. Tesla produced only around one million vehicles last year. Toyota makes ten times that in any given year. These bubbles and distortions represent an incredible misallocation of resources that is already harming the economy and which will alter the course of history when they pop.
Supply chains are distorted and will not be fixed any time soon. Things are not going to correct any time soon. The trillions that have already been printed are doing their dirty work right now. Government incentives not to work and the shutting down of businesses have already created a new economic culture. Workers cannot be found. The shop that closed down the road is never coming back. Every time you wear a mask and support the system of fear you put another person out of business. Government restrictions have already hollowed out the manufacturing of Western countries. Everything you buy now comes from China, and corrections to that system will take years, if not decades. Western countries produce largely intellectual goods.
I speak of socioeconomic collapse in my privacy guide. So, what about the social? People in the West can already see their cultures committing suicide as they demonize their traditions as inherently and permanently flawed and deserving of destruction. Racial and political divisiveness is reaching new heights. Books like In Defense of Looting perfectly represent a culture that cannot even believe in people’s right to their own possessions. Everything you have is at the expense of someone else. In place of cooperation is only power. Everything is a zero sum game; there are no winners—only suckers.
Crime rates are surging across the US already. When the social fabric unravels anything is possible. Economic collapses certainly don’t help. It was the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany, when the German mark was so worthless it was used as fire starter, that partly led to the desperate election of Hitler by a people who had lost all of their savings and life’s work. Today you can look at Venezuela as an example of what happens when a monetary system and an economy implodes. It’s not pretty.
And let’s not kid ourselves about ethics and human behavior. We like to think that we’re so enlightened now that serious violence and craziness would not transpire. Today, in January of 2022, there are more slaves in the world—some forty million slaves—than at any point in human history. The Rwandan genocide was only thirty years ago, where one million people were murdered by another tribe wielding machetes over the course of a couple months.
The economist Thomas Sowell compares two separate power-loss incidents in New York City; two incidents where power went out for the night. One was in 1965 and one was in 1977. In 1965 the crime that night was less than usual. In 1977 the crime was up with dozens, if not hundreds, of more incidents. Same city, twelve year difference. Things change, morality today is not so common and valued by everyone. In San Francisco today cars are being broken into at alarming rates; police have told Asian citizens—who earn the most of any ethnic group in the US—to take down house decorations that would identify them as an Asian household, and thus as a desirable place to rob.
Is anything I’ve said so far unknown to you? Then you should seriously reconsider where you get your information.
I’m not trying to be sensational. I’m not saying that a disaster is certainly headed our way. However, the economic and social climate across most places of the world today could certainly lead in this direction. There’s an old proverb, that humans are nine missed meals away from cannibalism. And if you think it’s not a possibility, you’re deluding yourself.
More likely economic collapse will come slowly. Your savings will erode along with you freedoms. Your ability to travel will be hampered, as will your ability to be send and receive goods. We’ve already seen a sampling of this in the last two years.
We don’t talk solutions in this essay. This is a warning. We will cover solutions in future episodes, and I suppose all of the solutions we discuss at Watchman Privacy will help. But I want to make sure that you know, in clear terms, what you’re up against.
Yours in peace and privacy,
Gabriel Custodiet
https://watchmanprivacy.com