Guest Post by Jeff Thomas via International Man
All countries have a “shelf-life” of sorts. Generally, they begin when an old, top-heavy government collapses from its own weight. The end of the old regime is characterized by civil unrest, revolution, secession, economic collapse or some combination of these conditions.
The new country generally has minimal government and little or nothing in the way of entitlements. It’s “sink or swim” for the people, and the recovery generally begins when a portion of the population rolls up its sleeves and creates an economy based upon production.
Over time, often a century or more, the population gets better at production and the country becomes wealthier. Along the way, whatever limited government existed has done all it could to expand itself. Governments, by their very nature, are parasites, living off the productive class, and eventually that parasite has the power to dominate those who produce, by promising largesse to those on the lower levels – who are in every society, the majority of voters.
This pattern has been followed for millennia. A nation establishes its freedom; it begins a productive economy; it develops wealth; it is taken over by a parasitical government; it goes into decline; it collapses, and the cycle begins anew.
At any point in history, there are always countries at every stage of this pattern.
Most of us have no problem in comprehending the initial stages, but, when the decline begins, it’s human nature to adopt the vain hope that the pattern will somehow reverse itself – that the snowball that’s rolling downhill ever more rapidly will somehow screech to a halt and roll back up the hill.
It never happens.
The worst stage, of course, is the inevitable collapse, and the stage when the greatest number of people are in the greatest level of denial is just prior to the collapse.
Only a few years before a collapse, most people in a country are still saying that it will all work out “somehow.” However, as the collapse gets closer, an increasing number of people start to say, “This is not going to work out. This is going to be very bad.”
And then, something quite surprising occurs. The vast majority of the individuals who see a dark future approaching them, just wait for the collapse to happen. They complain but remain.
Some of them buy a few cases of canned goods and store them in the cellar. Some buy weaponry. Some purchase some gold or silver in preparation for a monetary collapse.
Each of these preparations is likely to soften the blow of a systemic collapse. And each brings a level of comfort to the individual who recognizes that his country is reaching its sell-by date.
The trouble is, this comfort is much like driving a car whose brakes are failing. You realise that the car will soon go off the cliff but somehow take comfort in the fact that the car has an air bag.
Of course, it would be more costly and certainly much more inconvenient to have thought ahead and have bought a newer, safer car, yet very, very few people actually take that step prior to a national collapse.
Over the decades, I’ve routinely predicted market crashes and depressed economic periods before they occurred. This is not something that requires a crystal ball. The ability to see dramatic change coming is largely a question of three factors: study history, pay attention to unfolding events and be honest with yourself as to what those events indicate for the future.
Prior to each economic downturn, I’ve warned clients, partners, friends and associates as to what I saw coming. The reaction in each case was the same: only about ten percent actually bothered to listen to and remember the warnings. The others simply tuned it out.
Of the ten percent that listened, only about ten percent of that number actually prepared themselves for a possible change. Therefore, only about one percent actually were prepared when the change arrived on their doorstep and, so, were minimally affected.
Interestingly, whenever a negative economic shift occurred, the ninety percent who had tuned out the warning, almost invariably commented afterward, “No one could have seen this coming.” When reminded that they had been warned, they uniformly insisted that they’d never received any such warning.
They were not being untruthful – they simply had never taken the information on-board in the first instance and therefore had no recollection of it.
Since this was the case, these same individuals (the ninety percent) learned nothing from the downturn and they, almost to a man, repeated the same mistake when the next negative event occurred.
But, today, we’re approaching the mother of all economic collapses – one for the record books. Never have the mistakes made by the world’s governments been so extreme. Never have the debt levels that cause economic collapses been so irreversible.
And so, as we get closer to the first of the economic dominoes that will fall, an increasing number of people are experiencing an inexplicable bad feeling in the pit of their stomachs. They recognize that something quite bad will soon befall them but don’t fully understand it.
Based upon past experience, my estimation is that only one in ten will recognize that trouble is headed their way and only one in that ten will actually take positive action to geographically remove himself from ground-zero in anticipation.
The image above tells us that a building has been condemned. As the notice states, it’s dangerous and unsafe. The notice is printed on brightly coloured paper, in case we’re still not paying attention.
Unfortunately, economic collapses do not come with such helpful notices. We must seek our own information and draw our own conclusions.
That does not, however, mean that a collapse won’t happen. It only means that we must be more diligent if we’re to ensure that we’re well-away when a collapse does come.
For many years, I’ve been advising people on internationalization – the practice of diversifying oneself economically and physically in order to minimize the likelihood of becoming a casualty of any one jurisdiction and its negative developments.
In the last year, as the collapse has been getting nearer, I’ve been seeing an increasing number of people who state that they’re not sure exactly what’s going to happen, but they realise that they’d better begin to prepare to remove themselves and their families from the growing threat.
Of these, once again, ninety percent are those whom I describe as the “complain but remain” group – those who have the visceral understanding that they’re soon to become collateral damage – those who ask for advice as to what they can do about it – yet, in the end, do less than what’s necessary to remove themselves from impending danger.
At present, it’s still possible to take action. All that’s necessary is to overcome inertia.
Editor’s Note: It’s clear misguided socialist ideas are running rampant in the US. All signs point to this trend accelerating until it reaches a crisis… one unlike anything we’ve seen before. That’s exactly why Doug Casey and his team just released this urgent video. Click here to watch it now.
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All that Jeff says is immediatly obvious. All can see the tidal wave coming towards the beach. And yet, even when the wave is actually visible, there are still people standing on the exposed ocean bottom picking up sea shells.
My experience too has been that people don’t actually want to listen. They can hear. They can see. It is not that they have been presented the facts and told what to do about the facts, it is that they simply won’t take in the facts and use them.
We all see this behavior every day and 99% of us participate in the behavior. Having said all of that, I still don’t want to see any of my assets in any place that I can’t walk to. You have to factor in the possibility that travel to those foreign lands may well be restricted.
“My experience too has been that people don’t actually want to listen. They can hear. They can see.”
Acts 28:27 KJB… “For the heart of this people is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they closed; lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.”
Romans 5:8 KJB… “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
The problem with the warnings, imo, is there are so many of them and they come so often that one can’t help but think of The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
Yes, it is logical, to me and probably all of us on TBP, that “something” at “some time” is going to happen. It will be YUGE!!! But, “they” seem to have an unlimited number of lives and can put it off until you wake up one day broke and sitting in a pile of ammo and tin cans because “IT” didn’t happen yet.
Get Rich or Die Tryin.
It’s called doomsday fatigue. You hear so many warnings again and again over decades that never fully metastasis that even once true believers grow weary and fall away.
Same with the rapture or translation and removal of Jesus’ true church. All the current world events and God’s word are pointing to it yet it has still yet to occur.
There is a day of translation and of reckoning soon coming. Do not grow weary in your faith and well doing.
Ready or not he is coming.
At the last trump. The trump of God.
Come quickly Lord Jesus.
In this era of one world economy explain to me which countries are not going to be affected by the economic collapse THAT WILL TAKE IN PEOPLE FROM ELSEWHERE. Also explain to me how Joe Average is going to be able to afford uprooting his whole family and moving to another country with a different language and different culture assuming he could convince his family that being uprooted is necessary.
Annie, valid question, but I don’t think that he is suggesting that you and your family run. What he is suggesting is that you diversify your wealth by country as well as by industry. Place some of your wealth in assets which are outside of the control of the criminals who run your own country.
They do say this; they also suggest (in similar articles) obtaining second passports (as if that’s easy) and moving to places such as Argentina and Singapore to escape the havoc that will play out in the event of a total collapse, which is what I think this article is saying to expect.
Rob, he’s saying both. There’s also the issue of, if the economic collapse is going to be as bad as he says, how are you going to get your assets out of those other countries if you don’t move?
You have voiced the central flaw in his argument. If you send your assets to some other country, but you can’t get access to them, then what benefit is there to you?
Exactly, Annie. Likely everyone who reads TBP understands what’s coming and even what to do about it. But, articles like these uniformly ignore that 90%+ of people who know the end is near for the West do not have the wherewithal to move themselves and close family to another country. They also ignore the reality that 99% of us can’t just pick a country and move there. If I wanted to move my family to New Zealand, they’d tell us to piss off.
The elephant in the room is the unsustainable system that’s been in place for decades. We are consumers in a consumer culture that has maxed itself out. How many tons of plastic shit now pollute the oceans? Tons of clothing make it to africa and mexico and are resold and recycled and still there are tons piled up in warehouses and landfills.
Produce, over-produce and wipe out natural resources to produce crap that fills land fills and trash barges, is shuttled overseas only to be rejected and shipped back and/or dumped overboard.
Huge tracts of productive farmland are covered in concrete and subdivisions and strip mall and apartment complexes while existing strip malls are boarded up with for lease signs and the subdivisions become mass rental units tenanted by people who rent and trash the place and disappear.
There needs to be a new paradigm, one where quality is valued over quantity, where empty lives are filled with something better than buying the latest crap to compensate for the emptiness that comes from having no real value base or sense of purpose.
I don’t bemoan the collapse of a system that promotes mindless consumerism. There is more to life, much more.
Mygirl,
I have long stated I believe the answer to most of the worlds problems is a YUGE human die off.
People have grown accustomed to having things. Imagine all of that going away. Nobody is really ready. I sure wouldn’t be in a city. You can’t eat Gold.
Where are you going to go? Off-planet?
There is no not-ground-zero.
This “International Man” shit severely underestimates the bother and expense one has to go through to live in a country not one’s own. Putting your assets out of reach puts them … out of reach.
CB, Casey is just trolling for super rich folk. He charges a ton for hhis “wisdom”.