We're Doomed! Doomed!

...Hell of it is, we probably are. Stansberry and Associates are creating controversy and turning a tidy profit by telling you about it as a way of selling subscriptions to their service; and since it's prognostication, who's to say he's wrong? Trouble is, they have a mildly mixed reputation; when the first Google return for your name that isn't you contains fighting words like "scam," I gotta suggest the ol' emptor might wanna grain of caveat or two.

On the other hand -- the U. S. Dollar is in sad straits and fixing to become sadder, even with tough ol' Ron Paul on course to be chairing the committee that has oversight on the bureaucrats who advise the Fed on-- aw, we're doomed: onions have fewer layers.

You do need to have half a year's food set back (we're three months shy at Roseholme) and water, too (OMG, we have maybe a month); and though it is flat over the long term, gold has the advantage of holding purchasing power while the value of cash money plummets. (There's people swear by silver, which is way below the famous 16:1 ratio. Spin the wheel if you can afford it, I guess). And do those things not because doom is imminently imminent but because it is never all that far away; one winter storm, one tornado, one major illness or accident, one layoff can have you digging into your reserves and getting through -- if you have them.

Interestingly, as talk of a Coming Collapse or Greater Depression-Like-Thingie (GDLT, you read it here first, folks) is bandied about, I've been reading a very apt "seminal book of libertarian thought" that few folks seem to have read: Rose Wilder Lane's The Discovery of Freedom. (Go to Tam's Amazon link, buy a copy. You won't be sorry).

Ms. Lane's thesis, at least in the early going, is that while Government may be inevitable, it is invariably self-destructive as well; for every "service" a government renders past the bare minimum takes away energy that could be put to productive use; Government must inevitably grow to survive (since it accrues layer upon layer); and although "...there is a natural limit to the amount of human energy that Government can waste...," but "because men in Government are using...force, they have no means of knowing what this natural limit is." [Lane, op. cit. p 54, italics in the original].

She opines that societies only grow and prosper when Government is kept small enough that productive effort is not hampered; once Government has got big enough to meddle in economic activity, real progress comes to an end and they coast on past glories, eating up more and more productive capacity in parasitic routine until things fall apart. Government is simply a very complex self-unpowering machine that happens to provide police and courts.

Like that. Only with a lot more steps between "go" and "stopped."