Producers Survive To Rebuild

by Todd Walker

I wasn’t always a leech. I feel like one now. I no longer sign the front of paychecks. I’m a government worker – a school teacher. How do I reconcile this imbalance in my Libertarian mind? I produce nothing at my day job. I take money, with the help of armed government agents, from hard-working producers.

Just because I teach doesn’t mean I’m good at only one job. Over the years I’ve developed many talents. I’m constantly looking for new skills to add value to our quality of life and increase our chances of surviving the chaos about to be unleashed.

One of the best ways to survive the collapse that must happen is to be a producer. Granted, some producers will suffer during the coming crisis. However, leeches depending on the productive class will surely pile up in far greater numbers. Remember Katrina? Dependent upon government checks, the pillaging population took to the streets to get their due. Looting big screen TVs and Nike shoes are so useful for survival. Lesson learned? Nope. Productive folk, who aren’t familiar with human nature, might think the mammoth entitlement mentality would lose its momentum. Not a chance. I work in a government school and can testify that it is stronger than ever.

What you didn’t see during Katrina

What MSM (Main Stream Media) failed to parade across your living room boob tube was all those Americans that were not looting, rapping, and murdering. These producers were prepared as they could be for Mother Nature’s romp in the Bayou. It’s not as if this was the first hurricane to ever make landfall in the gulf region. The self-reliant contentedly did nothing. They didn’t have to form mobs to plunder their neighborhood for food and water. They exercised foresight and stocked up on essential supplies based on their situation and self-interest.

What if…

Another large-scale natural or manmade disaster hits, let’s say, thousands of cities simultaneously? A real TEOTWAWKI event covers us like a wet blanket (fill in the blank for your version). Law, order, and authority are vaporized instantly. Millions/billions would die off. Life without technology begins. The ensuing deeper Dark Age emerges.

Who’s going to rebuild civilization?

The producers will. If you’re reading this, you are probably in this tribe of the self-reliant. Or at least you want to be. You may be thinking you should have paid a little more attention to science and math in school. What’s missing in many “list of lists” in the preppersphere are books dealing with lower to higher order thinking skills in these vital areas. What’s a survivalist to do when the last of his soap runs out? I highly doubt folks have stocked enough lye to keep their tribe sanitary. Just how many bars of soap will you need to last 3 years into an apocalypse? How about gun powder? Can you create your own? I figure I can learn any skill. In our worst-case SHTF scenario, a book on chemistry might help you be a producer of a chemical compound called sodium hydrogen carbonate. Ah yes. Good old baking soda. With its many survival uses, your image would be carved on the front page of your local Dark Ages Stone Tablet. Young cave dwellers will gaze in earnest at your NaHCO₃ scribbled on the stone wall, preserved forever.

A childhood friend of mine owns a portable sawmill. He built his house out of wood he milled from his 50 acre homestead a few miles from our old stomping grounds. Producing dimensional lumber takes the right equipment and fuel. What happens when his gas storage dries up? Being a DIY country boy, he built a wood gasifier like this one. By turning scrape wood slabs into carbon monoxide and hydrogen (see, Science isn’t just for geeks) in his homemade gas refinery, his fuel needs would be met. The ability to produce lumber places him on the top of the trading/bartering circuit after the collapse. People will need and want my friend’s value-adding lumber.

Self-reliant minded individualists are people you should seek out. Network and build reciprocal trading relationships with these folks now. Brandon Smith’s Alt-Market.com was established to encourage networking, local community action and the exchange of knowledge and ideas. Free market individuals are who you’re seeking – people who put value on the individual and not the collective.

Will Your Stockpiling Strategy Work?

With enough time, your 3 B’ (Beans, Bullets, and Band Aids) will be long gone. Even that extra pair of boots you squirreled away eventually turns to brittle dust. I certainly subscribe to the stockpiling strategy. But it’s not sustainable in a true long-term sky-has-fallen scenario. I want enough stuff to help my tribe stay below the radar to avoid the previously mentioned desperate blood-sucking, looter mobs – especially the national statist entities. After the dust settles, we can emerge and begin rebuilding for our own self-interest and not to feed those who add no value.

I understand my last statement may cause misinformed to bristle. I sound harsh. I’m not. Truth hurts. Ignorance is not strength. For too long, we’ve been abused, pillaged, and rapped by the collective. Property rights, the means of production, have been stripped from individuals whom wish to be left alone. Forced charity at the point of a state gun is coercion. Never forget this equation: The State = Force. Once the “benevolent” government realized state-run welfare would enslave the recipient and rob the productive, the slide down the slippery slope of dependence began. Clamoring for charity – private or public – is no longer a social taboo. Nursing from the Government entitlement teat holds no stigma today. In the not so distant past, creative Americans exercised self-reliance and independence. The helping hand your grandparents may have used from time to time came from mutual-aid societies. There was no logical need for a forced welfare state. They depended upon each other’s reciprocity. Through time and its unquenchable thirst for power and total control, our Leviathan state slowly turned a nation of individualists into a society of panhandlers seeking the next handout.

Here’s the good news. There remains a remnant of creative individualist producers prepared to rebuild. Get ready. Find those willing to cooperate through trading value for value. Now, strap on your tool belt and your lab coat and produce something.

 

Keep Doing the Stuff of Self-Reliance,

Todd

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