Somewhere out in the great plains of the internet is floating a list someone made up of the 100 items that will be in the greatest demand during a collapse scenario. As I remember it was a decent list and a good place to start but it always made me wonder if people are prepared for the other side of that coin.
How will they pay for items after the collapse and how will they deal with the complete turn around in relative value?
I know what you're thinking, just like almost every other person (including myself once) who reads a preparedness blog.
"I got X amount of .22 LR cartridges ready to use as barter" or maybe "I stored away four cases of those small airline vodka bottles".
There are of course all kinds of commodities that will be valuable for trading. Yes especially small bottles of booze and .22 cartridges. The question is do you have a grasp on just how much say a 1 pound bag of dried beans will be worth after a collapse as well?
I mean seriously 1 pound of dried beans would feed a person for about 3 days. They would still be hungry no doubt but it would keep em going. Just how many .22 cartridges do you think that's worth? The standard I have seen some "experts" kick around is a .22 cartridge would equal $1.00 by today's figures which would mean 1 pound of dried beans would be worth 1 .22 cartridge.
I seriously doubt that. Yes you could conceivably turn around and use that one .22 cartridge to perhaps take more overall protein by hunting but that's a risk and the beans are a sure thing.
The point is the relative value of items is going to be completely out of whack and I seriously doubt if luxury items are going to retain as much value as some claim. That bottle of booze might be nice to take someone's mind off their problems but the one's who succumb to addiction will be gone quick. After that more realistic items become the demand norm.
So here's the long range problem. The same as your five year supply of stored food clock is ticking away how fast will your supply of barter items also dwindle? Can you replace or produce your own barter items or are you limited to what you have stored from the good old days when uncle Sam sent you a check and you converted it into prep items?
Are you taking into account how much more the items you cannot physically produce or gather yourself will rise in value? A standard truck bed load of firewood around here for example sells for about $50.00 right now. Do you think someone is going to trade you a load of firewood of that size for five small bottles of booze? Again I doubt it.
Prices or value of items is going to be much more regionally adjusted and vary accordingly and unless you can produce your own barter items you may find yourself lacking pretty damned quick.
Of course you could always speed up the food clock a bit and start trading those stores off too.
Keep Prepping Everyone!!!
I am going through a period starting maybe a month ago when every day one or two things seem to break. It is just coincidence I guess but I had to stop and think, what if it happened when there was know way to replace the items. I am close to that now because of limited funds but could at least buy them if I had money. In the future money won't do much until a new currency floats to the surface for lack of a better term. I suspect it will be energy and food related as that is what makes things work. Look back to colonial times and currency was non existent but people valued animals and tools, just look at wills from that time period, money was mentioned but great detail was made to list what we would not list today such as tools, clothes, animals the things that allowed survival. It was a different world then and is a good place to start when trying to see what life before/after the industrial/cheap energy period was like.
ReplyDeleteSf - I feel ya my friend. Seems somethign is always breaking around here as well and money just keeps getting tighter and tighter too. If it keeps up I may have to actually enter the wage slave pens once again. I love the job I have right now but it just ain't getting me enough hours right now.
DeleteYou are correct about the old values coming back. The things you mentioned will be at the top of the pyramid and I bet land owner rights will once again take on a much more important meaning.
Colonial times are probably not a bad example: some level of technology but everything new has to be hand made or hand maintained. When we went to Colonial Williamsburg it was a very interesting and eye opening experience. The gunmaker there was working on a pistol. I asked him how much it would have "cost". He said he had no way to judge the value but he had spent some thousands of hours working on it. How does one value the cost of an hour in such an economy?
DeleteI would hang on to the ammo, you could hunt small game with that, and
ReplyDeletei would keep the booze too.
Rob - I think most of the animals for hunting will be eaten in pretty short order. At that point the ammo becomes mostly self defense only kinda thing.
DeletePP,
ReplyDeleteBarter your service gunsmith, saddler, leather worker, farrier, and clothes making.
Tobacco products, homemade wine, medical service, reference material (how to).....
Sandy - Of course. The skills would be what I would shoot for or something I could produce pretty much all the time. Otherwise I think we would run out pretty fast.
DeleteTrade tends to collapse in a crises. We severely underestimate how much a legal system is needed to support even a small market-type setting. The libertarians liked to point the fairs of Medieval Champaign as an example of a market with no judicial systems. But guess what, Champaign was unusual for the number of courts (often repurposed) that dealt with trade issues, and that appears to have been an attraction.
ReplyDeleteIn a mega-collapse you would expect people are going to cluster into small groups of folks that they trust. Within that group you would likely just get everyone helping each other. The typical small group dynamics would eliminate the freeloaders just fine.
In a localized collapse, those who can get out , will. But then you would have more of a black market economy, and folks would barter away their stashed gold, jewelry, etc. for basics. In todays (an important point) dollar terms, I very much agree that the beans are the better buy than the bullets. My guess as to the best low cost today, high value later item: medicine - in particular antibiotics. Concentrated soaps/detergents, and water purifying tablets are probably the easiest non-bulk items to get hold of.
History is loaded with localized collapses. Much of the famous [Western] Roman Empire collapse played out this way. All you need to experience it is to be stuck in a warlike event that is spawned from the larger collapse causing event. Britain would be the prime Roman example, the 1990s fighting in the former Yugoslavia, or Grozny (Chechnya) would be a more modern example. Some parts of Mexico are like this, but there, everyone just up and abandoned their little farming communities.
Russ - I don't think you can really call the Roman collapse as localized. At that point the areas that weren't really touched would have already been in a collapse by today's standards. As things stand today if the US collapses then the world will follow for all intents and purposes. Alternative trade will have to emerge eventually though and I think would pop up wherever people are not shooting at each other.
DeleteI hope anyway :)
Only what I can produce from my own hands is what I'd trade. Food from the ground and what I can produce with wood. Advice would be free! Pretty much like now really!
ReplyDeleteKev - Exactly. If you can produce your own trade goods or commodities you are way ahead of the game.
Delete