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Feb. 4, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:37
1846 How to Survive the Coming Economic Crash - Freedomain Radio Interviews Woody O'Brien
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I have the inestimable Woody O'Brien on the line.
Thank you so much. He is, as he has told me, the very first solar-powered investment advisor.
I think that's on your business card, is that right?
That's good information for people to have as the economy becomes slightly less sustainable over the next little while.
Well, I think it's going to be a lot more than just slightly less.
I think we've got a terrible problem with energy resources, as we have with a lot of things in the economy.
A while back, I got notice from the federal government that people who were in the investment business had to have backup power, and I thought, well, you know what, if we're going to have a real crisis that's going to require backup power, I'm going to get mine solar, and we're now 100% solar powered here.
Wow. So, yeah, you came to me, I guess, through Max Keiser, the great Max, and he apparently, I guess, the conversation that you had with him was around some of the risks and tragedies awaiting the next phase of the U.S. economy.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you see coming up for the currency, the commodities, the food supply, and all that good juicy stuff.
I think people who've spent decades in finance fall into kind of two categories.
There are people who are prisoners and slaves of the system and people who see independently the crisis it is that we're headed to.
And frankly, I think the best way you can categorize the state of the world right now is we're at a currency extinction event.
In the same way the dinosaurs died off Because their time has passed, we're in a situation where all the electronic currency, all the paper fiat currency, this is all tied to such massive debts that just have to be liquidated.
And we're reaching a point in time when people are going to start to look at that paper dollar and realize it's no more valuable than toilet paper.
Just because a piece of paper has pictures of famous slave-owning presidents on it, And important looking Masonic symbols on it.
That doesn't make it worth anything.
And to me, we're at a point where collapse is absolutely unavoidable.
Nobody in Washington or New York either has a clue how to fix what's broken.
Or has any desire to fix what's broken because there's a lot of money going to be made from collapse.
So I think we're at the point where wise people, especially wise libertarians, which I guess is almost an oxymoron, have to be wise to be a libertarian, have to start to think about how are they going to prepare for economic collapse, how are they going to survive what's happening, and what's going to come after.
Because I think the greatest tragedy of the past 400 years Would be to endure what we're going to endure and turn around and rebuild the same kind of system that we had in the past.
We need to get rid of fiat slavery and we need to put it into the aspirin of history to never come back.
No, I think you're right. I mean, on so many levels, the first image when you said that the fiat currency is going the way of the dinosaur, I had this image in my head of a giant space fireball asteroid coming straight down on the Federal Reserve, hopefully, you know, when it's empty.
And I'm not a military man myself, but I think I would stand and salute that fireball with great alacrity.
And also, you know, when I was a kid, and I guess most kids go through this, at least in the West, you play Monopoly.
And every kid has looked at that, you know, that plastic tray after plastic tray of money, you know, the 500s, the 100s, the 50s, the 20s, and those useless little fives.
And we've all thought, wow, wouldn't this be great if this monopoly money, if I could actually go down to the toy store and buy stuff.
And then we laugh at ourselves for the foolishness of that idea, however pleasant it might be.
But people don't understand that's how the modern economy is run.
With monopoly money in lieu of real currency.
Fiat currency is the opposite of currency.
Because if you have no currency, at least you know you have no currency and you go to bar.
But if you have fiat currency, you have this slow-draining vampire-like predation upon the economy as people are invisibly hoovering more and more value out of the economy, devaluing each dollar that's left.
It's one of these really invisible, horrible diseases of the economy that...
Politicians rarely get punished for it.
They love it because they can print money and buy off their friends and allies and donators in the moment.
But the inflation often doesn't really hit until months or usually years later.
And it's really tough to connect it back.
But what was it, $7 trillion of fake money created over the last four years?
I mean, that is going to have staggering effects.
And people still... Can't see it yet.
The beneficiaries of this system are very, very clear, and the victims of it are invisible, because it is something that is so evil, yet so simple, that the simple explanation of it repels the mind.
When I try to explain how the monetary system works to people, they're like, oh no, it couldn't possibly work like that.
And there's a very simple narrative that I like to take people through, and I'd like to take you through it for a minute, and ask you the following question.
If I were to hand you a machine that could print $100 notes, How often would you go into debt once you had that machine?
Well, never. Never?
Never. That's the rational answer that any person would give you.
Now, do the Canadian and American governments have a machine that prints $100 notes?
I would say not directly.
It's not quite that crude because they use the banks as the intermediaries to get the money out, right?
Well, they both have a bureau of kind of engraving and printing that actually prints the notes.
And you go, how could people who have these machines that create money, how can they be in debt when none of us would do that?
Oh, I know. I know.
No, go on. You're the expert.
You go ahead. In effect, that's the nutty part of this.
If I had this machine that created money and I was a sovereign government, I would never give that machine to you as a central bank, allow you to create what used to be my money, and then lend it back to me.
This is why that if you ask someone who understands economics, if they took a blank sheet of paper and said design an economic system, That would take a country like the US and loot the wealth from the farmlands and the factories and transfer it to places like New York and Washington where it creates nothing.
You could not come up with a better looting machine than the one it is that we have now.
And it's not horribly complicated and we've just gotten to the point Where so much money has been printed to bail out so many people from so much malinvestment that we're to the point now where the core economy is essentially destroyed.
There's really not anything or very, very little economic activity in the United States anymore that is what you could describe as organic.
What we have is an economy that is a series of manipulations, and every government action is a new manipulation.
And we've reached to the point that the manipulations are no longer the answer.
The manipulations are the cancer.
And the patient is dying, and the question is, how are we going to survive what's coming, and what are we going to build on what it is that's left?
I think people who think there's an answer in the political process, which is going to save us from the cliff, That's a hopefully naïve thought.
What you need to do is start to prepare.
What that always strikes me as looking like, Woody, is that people think that there's rubber on the road of the political system, but the reality is that the financial decisions or the political decisions that doomed the system were made At least a generation and a half ago, I would say in the 1960s, the economic car has driven off the cliff.
And there's not a whole lot of point trying to steer a car when there's no rubber on the road, when it's just floating in that Thelma and Louise way, when it's floating through the sky.
You can turn the wheel if you want, but it's not going to change your destination at all.
And to go on with that analogy, there's that moment where the car is off the cliff and it's in the air.
And the forces of gravity haven't yet gotten to it to the point where it starts to fall down into the ravine.
It is still propelling forward.
And I think that's the place it is that we're getting to.
And this is a point in time where I think the vast majority of humanity, and certainly the vast majority of Americans, Are in total denial and they're totally unprepared for this.
I think these recent snowstorms and even Hurricane Katrina shows you how unprepared people are for an emergency that lasts a few days or a few weeks, let alone that one that goes on for months, which is the normal kind of time frame in a currency collapse.
And the truth is that people need to begin to prepare for their sum of all fears.
And they need to do it soon because if they don't, they're going to be involuntarily on a weight loss plan.
And I think the key...
Well, just before we get into it, I want to make sure that before we get into the cure, we just go spend a little bit of time on the diagnosis because monetary policy is the kind of topic that people will stay away from you in droves if you happen to sit down at a dinner party.
It's like, hey, I'm really interested in monetary policy.
People would rather sit next to the guy who's talking about a stamp collection.
But it is a really, really essential thing for people to understand.
The way that I view it, and I would rather you expound on it as the expert, but the way that I view it is that The governments came up with this fantastic way of diluting the direct effects of inflation through overprinting of currency.
Like if they just ran the printing process 24-7 and billions or trillions of dollars of real paper currency went into the economy within a few weeks or months, the inflation would hit almost immediately.
Right? Almost immediately and therefore it wouldn't work.
So they've had to come up with some way of stealing now and postponing the payments till later.
I mean, the best thing to steal from is from the security deposit box that no one's going to open for 20 years.
Because then, trying to go back and figure out who stole stuff from you 20 years ago is almost impossible.
So the more you can defer the day of reckoning, the more you can steal in the present.
And it seems to me that a huge variety of financial instruments You know, from treasury bonds to state-level debts to the promises of impossible-to-pay pension schemes and impossible-to-pay social security schemes and Medicare and health schemes and prescription plan schemes, that all of these instruments are basically designed to attempt to push off the day of reckoning to the point where, by the time it hits, everybody who matters has already got their money out of the system and moved on.
Is that a way off or is that somewhat in the realm of possibility for you?
That's a completely accurate statement because the system, especially the political system, is set up in a mode where everybody just wants to kick the can down the road and to make this somebody else's problem.
And they're always looking for new ways to come up with new angles to loot the future.
And some of them are so bizarre that they defy belief.
For example, in the United States, we have individual retirement accounts, which allow someone to save for retirement and get a tax deduction.
Somebody in Washington figured out this idea.
Well, we'll set up a Roth IRA, which will allow people to pay the taxes on the money they put into retirement.
And that means the money they accumulate will be tax-free.
And 30 years from now, that money will come out tax-free, free, which in a roundabout way basically allowed the current Congress to loot a Congress that's still in boarding school in New Hampshire by basically saying, we're going to steal revenue from that Congress that's still in high school by getting the taxes now and we're going to steal revenue from that Congress that's still in high school by getting the taxes now and making them deal with the consequences of there won't be
So the system, the monetary, the financial, the political system is set up by a bunch of looters and thieves who, I would say, they're always looking for a new way to be Al Capones.
They're always looking for a new way to say, you'll give me a penny.
On your loaf of bread, or we'll blow your store up.
In the business I'm in, one of the government regulators has just told financial advisors that you can't have your own website anymore, but you can have a website for this crony capitalism company that we've set up over here, and you'll pay five times what it would cost you if you did it yourself or hired somebody else, and because we're in charge, that's now the rule.
So there is a culture of theft in America that basically we have an economy of robbing each other.
And at the end of the day, that's not going to work because eventually people are going to say, I'm not going to lend the government any more money.
I'm not going to accept their paper.
And there's a big part of the culture now that wants to get rid of their dollars and buy real things or put it into something barterable like gold or silver as quickly as they can earn it.
Because you don't have to be a genius in economics to realize we have an unsustainable situation here.
And in the four or five thousand years of monetary history, lots of countries and cultures have tried to print their way to prosperity.
It's just never worked.
And it's not going to work this time either.
And, you know, people just have to recognize that and cowboy up.
Get ready because it's going to get bad.
Now, Doug Casey was on here recently calling from his hidden anarchist compound in South America, and he put forward the prediction that he felt that the existing U.S. system was not going to outlast the year.
What's your estimate?
I know there's no crystal ball, so no one's going to hold you to anything, but would you be within that time frame or close to it in terms of...
No, he didn't say, and then, you know, a great hole opens up in the North American continent and we all descend into the hell of fascism.
What he basically said was, Without significant adjustments or without significant readjustments, let's say.
Is that within your time frame or do you think it's going to be longer or shorter?
You know, this is the most common question that people in my business get, and I would say it's the most irrelevant question.
Because when collapse happens, it could be tomorrow, it could be a month from tomorrow, it could be a year from tomorrow.
I don't know, and neither does anybody else.
But I'm going to tell you that when it does happen, there is only one question that's going to matter in people's lives.
Are you ready?
Are you ready? And the truth is, I don't think anybody can be as ready as they'll wish they were because no one really knows how it will play out.
But I think this is one of those cases where the good and the perfect are not enemies.
Almost anything that people do to prepare is going to put them in better shape than their neighbors.
I have a friend of mine who says to me all the time, I agree with all of what it is you say, but The only preparations I'm going to make is I have 10,000 rolls of toilet paper stored in my basement.
Because I know in a crisis that people will give their teenage daughter for a roll of toilet paper.
As goofy as that sounds, he's probably in much better shape than anybody else in his zip code.
So anything that I think that people do to prepare for almost as if it was going to be like a hurricane or a snowstorm that was going to last for months.
It is appalling to me that the average American household only has three or four days worth of food.
And even when we have a forecast of a bad snowstorm, people run to their grocery store and they sell out the shelves of milk and eggs and bread as if there was going to be like a French toast revolution that we have to accommodate.
But the fact of the matter is, is people need to prepare.
Throughout recent history, currency collapses are events that usually last three to six months until some new kind of currency regime is rolled out.
And people need to ask themselves, where's my water going to come from?
What if I don't have any electricity?
Where is my food going to come from?
Where am I going to get fuel from?
How am I going to operate in my day-to-day life for a period of three to six months, possibly even without any internet, without any telephone?
Anything that you do to prepare for that eventuality is going to be something that's going to make you very, very happy later.
I like to use the Michael Rupert line is that economic collapse is going to be a lot like a bear attacking a campsite.
You don't need to be faster than the bear.
You just need to be faster than the slowest camper.
Some of the things that I would advocate that people ought to start doing is to start practicing barter.
When you're dealing with local small businesses, ask them if they're willing to be paid in something other than dollars.
Ask them if they're willing to pay in silver.
Start to learn who your local farmers are because, believe me, if there's a crisis and you're buying from them on a regular basis, They are going to feed you and take your money or your silver before they're going to take somebody it is that they don't know.
So build up your trust relationships prior to the necessity, right?
So that you're a known face and a known commodity.
Absolutely. Survival in a real crisis is about preparedness, and it's about who it is you know.
And sorry, just to reiterate the importance of that, because the likelihood is that barter will be banned, and therefore they'll be concerned that there may be government agents who are trying to sting them, whereas if they've known you beforehand, they won't feel that, and so it's much more likely that they will continue to deal with you.
I would say that certainly is one of the possibilities, yes.
And people, this is a skill.
It's like ice skating.
If you've never done it before, you better get on a frozen sheet and start practicing.
And one of the things that I've encouraged people to do is there's a great section on bartering in Craigslist.
People ought to look at it every day.
They ought to take things they have around their house they don't need and try and barter them from something else.
This is a skill set that people need to start to develop.
And the good news is that Even if by some chance all the experts are wrong and this collapse never happens, well, given all the amount of fiat money that's floating around the globe, one thing's for sure, anything that they buy in order to protect themselves is something that's going to be much more expensive two years from now.
Most people who invest money two years ago would have been better to invest their money in cases of corn.
Well, yeah, and to reiterate that, again, just for the people who may be a little bit less economically literate, there is either going to be a financial collapse and a revision of the dollar, like what happened in Germany when they reintroduced the Reichmark to take out the Weimar currency, which, you know, this is the old wheelbarrows of money to go buy a loaf of bread kind of thing.
There's either going to be that kind of collapse of existing currency and reintroduction of a new currency, Or there's going to be significant, significant inflation.
And either way, you're better off.
And of course, you buy stuff that you're going to use anyway.
You buy food and water, which you're going to use anyway.
And so, in a sense, it's a hedge without a downside.
Absolutely. I would say the best case scenario is it becomes a terrific investment if you invest in food and invest in survival kinds of things.
The worst case scenario is it's something that really saves your life.
And I think there are people who say, well, is it better to have food?
Is it better to have water?
Is it better to have guns and ammunition and all the things that go along with that?
I think the answer is you should get as much as you can and be as prepared as you can because nobody knows for sure how this collapse is going to play out.
Nobody knows what the triggering event is going to be.
One of the things that I think is a reasonable possibility is the people who have caused this Start to think, well, the only way out of this is to go back and revisit what Nixon did in 1971 and remove the dollar from the gold standard.
Literally, the president could get on television on a Sunday night and say, tomorrow morning, we'll start redeeming dollars for gold at the price of $50,000 an ounce.
If you have $50,000, you can get an ounce of gold.
If you have $1,000, you can get an ounce of silver.
Obviously, that would make people who had gold and silver very, very happy, but no one really knows if that's an antidote which would cause hyperinflation or would stop it.
So there are lots of remedies that are yet to come, and nobody knows exactly how this is going to fall out.
And frankly, I don't think it's relevant.
The only question that's relevant is, are you prepared?
Because when it happens, it's going to be too late to be prepared, exactly as it was in Zimbabwe or Iceland or Greece.
You know, by the time it's on the news and you want to run to the grocery store, it's going to be too late.
Everybody's already going to have been there and the shelves are going to be empty.
That is historically how this pans out.
Now, you have obviously gone through this process yourself.
Are there any specific websites or resources that people can access from home that you have found to be particularly useful and helpful in preparing for this possibility?
I think eFoods Direct is a great source of stuff that will last in paint cans for 25 years, food that will last in paint cans.
There's more websites than Carter has little pills about water and And water pumps, there's quite a few about solar and solar generators.
So I would tell people, eFoods Direct is the one that I would specifically mention.
But if people want to contact me, I actually have this great list called the 100 First Things to Disappear.
Which is from back in the days when Bosnia fell.
It's a list of a hundred things that are gone within a matter of weeks, which people really need.
It's a fascinating list. If anybody wants to shoot me an email, woody at abolishviatslavery.com, I'd be happy to send them a copy of this list.
I think you really just have to say to yourself, if everything stopped, if there was no electricity, how would I charge my cell phone?
If there was no food, how would I eat?
If there was no electricity to pump the water, you know, you're going to be in trouble in a hurry if you don't have fresh water supply.
So I think it really just requires people to think outside the box.
Everybody's circumstance is different.
And the important thing is, for people to grow up, this is not a problem that's going It is time to cowboy up and realize that if you don't start to make preparations now, if you're not at least as smart, my grandfather used to say that all you have to be in life is smarter than the average squirrel.
Because what a squirrel does all summer is he prepares up his nuts and he puts them in trees, many, many different trees, in case somebody comes along and chops down one of the trees.
All you have to be here is smarter than a squirrel.
You need to start putting your nuts in places that when economic winter comes, you're going to be ready.
And I would also remind people that...
Although it sounds alarmist, there's many, many historical examples of this all the way back from the Roman Empire when they began shaving down the currency and substituting copper and other kinds of crap into their gold.
Until the point at the end, it's interesting where the numbers lie.
So in the end of the Roman Empire, there was no more than about 2% gold in the gold coins.
In other words, there had been a 98% devaluation right before the collapse of Rome.
And I think here, or in the United States, you're looking at about, since 1913, a 97-96% devaluation.
So it's not that far off in terms of where there seems to be an event horizon.
It's very similar to kind of depending on what measuring stick it is that you use, you know, 90 to 100% to valuation.
And I think there are parts of this for which it is we have no, we can obviously blame the Federal Reserve and the bankers of Wall Street for a great deal of it, but there's a large part of this for which we have no one other than ourselves to blame.
And I'll give you a perfect example of that.
There is global trade, which is America sends something to Canada and you guys send us wonderful hemp hearts, which can't be grown in the U.S. And that's an even exchange.
That's trade. However, when I buy my hemp hearts from Saskatchewan directly and I give them paper money, now that's commerce.
Because it involves a fiat transfer of money, and that's how the manipulation can occur.
And if you look at the industrial giant that the U.S. used to be, we used to feed ourselves, we'd feed the world, almost everything that was here was made here.
There is something that I would urge every American and every Canadian to do, is pick a room in your house and go into that room and take everything out of that room that was made in China Or any other country besides the US and Canada.
I think most people in North America would have a very empty room.
By buying things which are made in other countries, we're helping employ people and we're creating prosperity someplace else.
We're not creating it here.
The common argument is, well, but those foreign goods are so much cheaper.
And this is true, but it's true because of currency manipulation.
And I think when people would realize how much fuel is expended on these ships that come from China to Los Angeles, the 20 largest cargo ships create more air pollution than all the vehicles in the world.
And there are hundreds of these ships.
If you like to breathe in and out all day long, you certainly don't want to be adding to pollution by buying things from China.
As hard as it is to find things that are made in North America, people need to start doing it.
Because after collapse occurs, my prediction is we're going to go back to very localized economies.
Because there's not going to be the resources to pay for fuel to bring things from far away.
And people are going to recognize that that was a part of the problem.
But I think for right now, people should try this test.
Pick a room, take everything out of it that wasn't made in the U.S. or Canada, and you can see that's the degree to which it is that you're complicit in the system it is that we have now.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with you on some of that.
I think that there is good strong arguments to be made for free trade between countries, and there certainly are countries that do stuff better than the stuff that America does better.
What has caused so much distortion in free trade is the amount of regulation and government controlled unionization that has gone on in the United States, which has crippled the local manufacturing industry.
The rise of taxation has forced people in a sense to go for cheapness rather than quality, which has encouraged Yeah, I think.
Perfectly free world, free trade between countries would be fine, not that there would be countries, but I certainly agree with you that there's a lot of problems with buying foreign now because it has become so distorted through various status initiatives.
Well, even the pollution element of it, where goods that are made in China are made without any environmental standards at all, and they're shipped without any environmental standards, and you could say, well, one of the reasons the end product is so cheap is because all of those unfunded liabilities of the cost of environmental destruction Have just been set aside on a shelf to be later paid by somebody else.
Where in the US, if you're a manufacturer and you create a product for which it is, there has to be chemical or toxic waste, you have to pay for the cost of taking care of that right away immediately.
And that's one of those things that you can just go...
There is no easy solution to, but obviously in a post-collapse world, that's something we're going to have to figure out.
No, I think that's an excellent point.
And I also think that, I mean, the economic arguments about where an increasingly socialized or communistic system such as the US and pretty much all of the Western democracies, I mean, if If percent ownership or percent control of the economy is considered the distinction between free market capitalism and socialistic communism or fascism,
then if you count GDP, governments around the world have become, even in the West, almost completely communist.
And the US is definitely on its way there.
I think the national debt, without counting the unfunding liabilities, is 60 or 70% of GDP. And of course, the GDP includes all the people who work for the government, who really shouldn't be counted as GDP, because the majority of them are sort of parasitical.
And so the arguments about the degree to which Economies decay and decline and collapse, thus requiring these injections of temporary heroin hits of fiat currency overproduction.
These arguments have been made since the 1920s under von Mises with his critiques of socialism.
They were made, I think, very powerfully and literally by Ayn Rand starting in the 1940s and in the 1950s.
There has been people like Murray Rothbard and Hayek and all of these with The Road to Surfdom writing all of these amazing tracks predicting exactly what's going to happen.
And it's sort of like when you say to somebody, don't smoke, you're going to get sick.
Don't smoke, you're going to get sick.
And then they don't listen to you for 50 years and then they get sick.
You couldn't be sadder about being right.
And that's how I feel, spending the last quarter century attempting to drill into people the disasters of using state control and violence to attempt to solve complex social problems.
I've never been less happy to be right in my life than looking at the abyss that may be coming towards us.
Well, clearly what we have now in North America cannot be called capitalism anymore.
I think it'd be much more accurate to say kind of a fascist statism of, you'll do what it is you're told, and if you don't like it, that's just too bad.
I think even if you look at things like the healthcare reform, I remember when Obama was running for president saying, you know, we're going to clean up the insurance market in order to be able to lower costs.
Yet, you have business owners all across America who are getting rate increases of as much as 90% because the new health care bill, which has already been declared unconstitutional, The insurance companies, even though it's been declared unconstitutional, are sending out letters saying, well, you're no longer allowed to have this little bit of insurance that you've decided is appropriate for you.
The government says you have to have this much insurance, and that costs so much more.
I got a letter that says I need to have unlimited lifetime coverage For a health catastrophe.
Now, I don't know about you, I can't imagine allowing the witch doctors to put a million dollars worth of healthcare into me that I could die another day.
And I had a five million dollar limit on my policy, but now for the government to say, I've got a trillion dollar limit.
And I have to have coverage for drug abuse and for mental illness and all these things that I've decided I didn't want to cover.
And my premium will go up a great deal.
I think this is the perfect kind of statist solution to say, you'll do what we tell you to.
We have a government of lies.
And throughout America, people have to listen to this nonsense that the inflation rate is 2% or 3%.
When everyone who walks into a grocery store or who goes to the doctor, and that's 40% of the economy between food and medical care, sees those prices going up 20%, 30%, 40% per year.
They see the price of gas.
That's another 15% slice of the economy going up dramatically.
Well, if over half of your economy is going up 25%, 30% per year, The only way that you get inflation of 2 or 3% is to calculate the value that your house went down.
Buy and say, well, if your house went from $200,000 to $150,000, that's a 50% reduction in your cost.
Not a capital loss.
So it is literally a government of lies.
And again, that's part of the culture of, let's find a new way to loot.
Let's find a new lie to tell.
How can we fool them today?
How can we kick the can down the road to the point where this collapses on somebody else's watch?
I would tell you, the people who say this is all going to fall apart this year in 2011 or 2012, I don't want to put a date on it because it wouldn't surprise me if it was tomorrow.
It wouldn't surprise me.
No one knows what the tipping point is going to be for people to start to look at the money in their wallet and say, I've got to get rid of this before it's worth nothing.
Right, right. And I think that we can see what's happening in Egypt as well is that when the price of groceries goes up too high, particularly for people on fixed incomes, you do get these kinds of problems.
And again, throughout history, social change has been predated by a lack of food in the cities and cities are entirely dependent upon imported food.
And if creditworthiness of currency, or in this case, it's the banning of exports of food, particularly grain, from Russia and from India, and of course, Egypt is the largest importer of grains in the world, you don't have enough food, you get the Marie Antoinette, let them eat cake moment, and there is significant change.
I think it's safe to say, though, that the government is still sitting on a fair number of fixed assets that they will attempt to have a fire sale of in an attempt to prop up stuff.
They're going to sell off land and buildings and cars and stuff like that.
And there's going to be a fire sale, the upside of which is that you hopefully, and I think to some degree, it will happen, it will move Some capital assets from the unproductive or counterproductive state market into the private sector, which I think will provide a boost.
The problem of course is that every time you provide a boost to the private market, to the free sector of the economy, And if there's a spike in wealth creation, all that happens is then the government has more to tax and then grows even further.
So I think there will be some spasms and retrenchments of the collapse as it goes down.
But I think it's important to recognize those as dead cat bounces and that the system as a whole is going to have to change and be written, hopefully, I argue, from philosophical principles around nonviolence and respect for property rights from the ground upwards.
But it's important not to be fooled by any dead cat bounces that occur on the way down.
There's a lot more money to be made if collapse can happen like a leaf falling to the ground where it goes down and then it blows up and people have the opportunity to trade both sides.
But I think what's going on now in Egypt is a great tutorial because this really is about food prices and in most of the third world, the average person is spending much more than half of their total income Sorry, just to reiterate, 40% of Egypt's citizens live on about $2 a day.
Can you imagine? I mean, it's astounding.
And of course, food price increases is the difference between eating and dying.
If you're in a situation where half or more of your income is going to food and food prices double, you're in a terrible dilemma and you're there in a very, very big hurry.
Because at $2 a day, it's not like you have savings or a line of credit or other resources to fall back on.
In the United States and in the West, that food number for most people is between 10 and 20 percent of income.
So as this kind of goes around, we may be in America, we may be the last person to take the punch in the nose because it's going to require food prices to go up a dramatic amount and for fuel prices to go up a dramatic amount.
I've always said, imagine how high gasoline would have to be Well, sorry, just to interrupt that, but you have to remember, Woody, of course, there's a lot of people, I mean, millions of people in America on low fixed incomes from the government, whether that's welfare or students or retirees.
They simply can't afford.
I mean, there's a ceiling by which they simply can't afford increases in food, and I think those will be the people who will get pretty restive for the first.
They will be the first Egyptians in the street.
But I think for the big bulk of the middle class, it's going to have to be food and fuel.
Because you take someone who, say, makes $500 a week, and a third of that goes to taxes, and so much of that goes to commuting, and so much of that goes to keeping a roof over their head and food.
You start to take the food and fuel component and double it, all of a sudden now they don't have any money left to eat, and it doesn't make sense for them to put gas in their car and drive 20 miles to go to work.
That is going to be our age-up moment, and the question of when that occurs is really anybody's guess.
And as long as people have the right diagnosis, we can affect a much better cure.
My concern, as always, is that people have the wrong diagnosis and they feel that it is somehow a lack of government-sized power and control.
It's the free market that has failed because that's all people see, right?
They say, oh, the price of gas is going up because of those predatory capitalists are charging me too much and food is going up because these predatory grocery stores are ripping me off and gouging and in status of emergency and then All the idiots in the world who feel there's not enough bread go burn down the bakery and then wonder why they starve to death.
It's so frustrating. But, I mean, this is the reality.
We're trying to get the word out there, but it's hard to get people to listen.
It is a false choice to say, you know, free markets, because I always say, really, what free markets?
Because in America, if you want to see a free market operate, you need to go to a flea market, because that's about the only place that's left.
For a number of years, you could say eBay was a relatively free market.
Now, you know, that's pretty well regulated, and there's lots of things it is you can't do there.
But I think beyond eBay and your local flea market, there really isn't a whole lot of free market anywhere in America because essentially everything is regulated.
I have a friend of mine who's an organic farmer, and this latest food legislation they passed literally has the potential to make organic farming against the law.
Right, right. And even in the flea markets, of course, because there's so much black market and gray market activity, they really are flying without contracts and refunds, and so they're on the move.
So even they are being affected by the regulations insofar as they have to operate outside the generally accepted rule of common law.
And so even the gypsies are on the run because of the state that's hovering around.
So now I just want to make sure that before we finish up, I really do thank you for your time.
It's been a very engaging and enjoyable chat.
If you could give out your fixed particulars, I think you, I can't remember the website that you had that almost needs no description based on the name.
If you could make sure that you put that out so people can contact you.
And also if you could remind people where they can get your list of the top 100 things that go missing or go away.
I think number one was pet grooming supplies, which I know is very important to the majority of my poodle-owning listeners.
But if you could give out your vital statistics, that would be great.
Well, they can get me through abolishfiatslavery.com.
That has links to my other video interviews and articles I've written on Gold Seek as well as Facebook.
Or they can just shoot me an email, woody at abolishfiatslavery.com.
And I'm more than happy to answer any questions.
Or if anybody wants that list, just request.
It's the hundred things to disappear first.
And I will put a link to all of that stuff below the video and in the descriptions for the audio.
And are there any words of hope and encouragement you'd like to perhaps lever a little bit of the elephant of doom that may be sitting on people's chest at the moment?
I would tell one people, in the long-term future, we should all be very, very optimistic.
Because in a post-collapse world, once this happens, it's going to be terrible for a while.
But afterwards, things will start to get better.
They'll get better in an organic way.
And the one thing is for sure, is that our long-term future is bright.
And the reason is, is it's not possible for us to rebuild a monetary system as stupid We could put the school for the retarded in charge of central banking and they would do a better job than the people that we have now.
And I think there's lots of great intellectual infrastructure out there among libertarians and patriots who are prepared to dominate the discussion about what kind of system is rebuilt on the ashes when this one collapses.
And I'm going to tell you, that's the one thing that makes me optimistic that 40 years from now, North America will be a much more stable place to live than it is now.
Yeah, I think it's fair to say you can't get rid of the cancer without a little chemo, but you can get rid of the cancer.
And I think nothing's going to build credibility among freedom activists like having basically shouted at the wind for decades and then being proven right will either get us in the gulags or get us into positions of authority, at least from a cultural standpoint.
I hope to the latter, and that's certainly what I aim for.
And I think you're right. I think people need to look beyond The passage through hell that seems to be pretty imminent and there is clear and better sailing beyond and these are the kinds of lessons that once mankind learns and which can be forever re-amplified, re-understood and re-analyzed through the internet and the great communication system that we have.
Once we go through it, it's really, really hopeful and I think can be well argued for we won't need to learn these lessons again because they're going to be so bad and so well explained that hopefully we can finally learn from history and not go down this fiat currency road again.
And as I always like to say, the good news is once we figure out who all the criminals are, we have the perfect jail for them already at Guantanamo Bay.
All we have to do is let the innocent Afghans go home.
And there's a cell waiting for Ben Bernanke and the people at Goldman Sachs who belong in the beautiful Cuban sunshine for the rest of their life.
Well, I really appreciate your time, and thank you so much.
It's been a very enjoyable chat, and I'll post all of your particulars below, and I'm sure you can expect a deluge of questions from my listeners.
Anytime. I'd be happy to come back.
Anytime you'd like to talk to me again.
Thank you so much, Woody. Take care.
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