SurvivalBlog.com

Jim,
As the author of the article being discussed, I would like to address the concerns expressed by “Rocky in the Midwest”

This is a good example of the kind of reactions you will undoubtedly run into if you attempt to confiscate someone’s property. He is exactly right and justified in being indignant. He has worked hard and accumulated his property lawfully and has every right to use it as he wishes. Morals aside, confiscating privately owned property not only causes anger and resentment, it’s just a bad idea on many levels. Doing so will destroy your local economy. I suspect that Rocky is a pillar of his community and will be instrumental in rebuilding the economy after a crash. He is exactly the type of person who will probably hire locals and begin to rebuild.

One of the most important things you must do is get consensus from your community. If the majority of the people think, like Rocky, that the Wal-Mart and other corporations still have property rights and their property is off limits, then you probably cannot proceed with the course I outlined. You have to convince your town that confiscation and redistribution of goods is in their best interest. You also need to get a consensus on which goods to confiscate and work out how you will compensate people for what you take and use.

The thing you must get across is this: Without some kind of redistribution of scarce resources and a working police department, nobody’s property is off limits. Most of the people in the community are going to be hungry very fast. Nobody just sits down and starves to death. They are going to attempt to find food or whatever their family needs. Hungry people loot. I believe this is inevitable. Without someone guarding it, Wal-Mart is going to be looted. When people get hungry enough they will try to take Rocky’s cattle themselves. I believe it’ better to attempt to maintain order and community cohesion, even if it requires extreme measures. “Let them eat cake” sounds like a recipe for anarchy and mass starvation. Just my two cents. – J.I.R.

James:
I agree with “Rocky in the Midwest”. There will need to be leadership in the communities that develop after TEOTWAWKI, but that leadership needs to be democratically decided or you will end up with a dictatorship. The original author is proposing Socialism. As for my “preps”, I have prepared for “Charitable Giving” as required by my God, but will eliminate the first man who confiscates (without my consent) anything in my possession because those items are needed for my family’s survival.

Mental preparation is as much or more important than physical preparedness and those who have not prepared mentally will be a great burden for all that they come in contact with. I agree that performing triage for refugees might ideally be performed by someone with medical background, but medical personnel deal with hurt people and most refugees, being able-bodied, will need to be triaged in an entirely different manner – based on the need(s) of the local community and the refugee’s ability to value add. That type of triage takes an entirely different type of leader than a nurse. Probably someone like Rocky in the Midwest that is prepared to defend his own. – Mel in Texas

Dear Editor:
J.I.R. plans on conscripting the police force and able-bodied men into armed gangs who pillage food and fuel stores to control them for their own purposes. He probably should have included plans for a secure fortress from which to issue his edicts because it is likely that after he sets the terms of engagement, property owners will respond in like manner. When his gang eats the stolen food and everyone else goes hungry, the rough stuff will begin in earnest. Let his plans be a warning to everybody. Especially if you live in a small town, petty tyrants must be put down. Once they begin stealing at the point of a gun, there is only one way to answer: get rid of them or get away. Property owners who respect the rights of others can rebuild. Thugs can only destroy, consuming your resources. Protection of life and property is a cost, but we who produce will choose whether to outsource the cost, and if so, to whom we will outsource it. We will not outsource it to those who would commandeer our resources and use them to rule over us. – John D.

James:
I read and reread this posting several times. This man suggested a crisis response that sounds like communism under Joseph Stalin. He thinks the small town mayor should go out into the countryside and confiscate all of the livestock, feed, grain and seed, gas and diesel, and heavy equipment. He states that the highest priority for this is to maintain the power of the city government and allow the city cops to maintain their patrols. He later gets around to talking about farming and raising food, but mostly he talks about small gardens. I believe this author has always bought his food in the store and he does not know beans about farming.

He specifically talks about taking all the grain stored on the farms and all the livestock held in confinement buildings. I would love to see the mayor and a bunch of city folks confiscate and then herd 1,000 feeder pigs down the road and into town. Where does he plan to pen them up? Just who is going to butcher them? And how are you going to preserve the meat?

The reason that farmers keep several hundred gallon of fuel on site, is because they need it to plant and harvest. Taking away their fuel will leave the field unplanted or the standing crops unharvested. You also need grain trucks and the fuel to transport it. And just where is this small town going to store 20,000 bu (1.2 million pounds) of grain they might get from one small farm. Now try that from the entire county. Unless they have a local elevator they would have to dump it in the middle of the street.

The answer to this conundrum is quite easy, the grain, the fuel, and the livestock belongs on the farm and so do the people. The unemployed people from the small town need to move out onto the active farms in the area. The farms will need the additional labor and the extra folks with guns to protect the food. Those larger farms with substantial grain bins should be selected as primary storage areas for the community. You do not attempt to farm by hand or using horses, but you farm using diesel tractors and all available fuel goes to farming. You prepare for this possibility by building a local plant for processing of soybeans into biodiesel.

I am certain that growing, storing, and transporting food is more important than keeping a bunch of fat cops in patrol cars. The socialistic, almost communistic type centralized command and control this author suggest would ensure a famine in the breadbasket of the world. Frankly, I find his point of view absolutely terrifying.

This is one of the most thought provoking postings I have even read, thanks. – Hick

James:
This piece (and the largely warm response to it so far) deeply undermines theories of survival based on individualism and reliant on guns, fortresses, and hoarding. Though I can imagine certain kinds of short-term crises where a guns, fortresses, and hoarding strategy might work, a years-long collapse is certain to lead to the kinds of issues raised by J.I.R.

I completely agree with J.I.R.: Long term, communities (a dirty word to radical individualists) must organize and work together. And so all of a sudden on a survivalist web site like yours, someone has gotten real and is talking about community, the dangers of anarchy, the rule of law, justice, the protection of the weak, and even redistribution of property. In other words, government, the very thing most survivalists demonize the most. This is unavoidable. No guns-based, hyper-individualistic strategy could ever work for long.

That’s why I’m a left-wing survivalist. To me, the key is cooperation and production. Though the old self-reliant American lifestyle was fading when I was a child in the 1950s, the infrastructure and social fabric that supported community-based self-reliance had not yet decayed. I understand pretty well how it all worked, because I saw my relatives living that way on their family farms, and I did my share of the kind of farm work appropriate to children. I grew up and moved away, and I lived in the city for many years (San Francisco, the city most hated by guns, fortresses, and hoarding types). But when I saw what is all too likely to happen, I moved back to remote farming country where people still have fields, pastures, barns, farming equipment, and skills. This community-based strategy is based on getting to know, and trust, your neighbors. It’s all about planning, based on your own location, for the kinds of issues raised by J.I.R.

Those who are not in love with their guns, and who find heroic, Ayn Rand notions of individualism laughable, find these realities easier to see.

I recommend a rather funny essay by Charles Hugh Smith on why gun-worshiping hoarders are bound to fail. The essence of it is this: “Because the best protection isn’t owning 30 guns; it’s having 30 people who care about you.” – David D.

Dear J.W.R.:
J.I.R., the author of the “Community Crisis” article, is apparently a statist. He believes that confiscating people’s belongings is appropriate in an emergency.

Theft of another’s property is never appropriate! Period! It’s called looting among right-thinking people. The author of this piece says that some people own too much stuff. Because of that, some of their stuff should be stolen and given to others who don’t have enough stuff. This idea is called socialism.

He also says that “anarchy is the dirtiest word in the English language and should be avoided at all costs.” Anarchy has many definitions. The most important one is Society Without Government, which is not at all a dirty word, or an evil definition. It means free-market capitalism, a system which the author of this piece believes cannot work without proper controls put in place — in other words, the establishment of not-free-market, non-capitalism.

[A brief flame snipped, for the sake of civility,]

The same author used exactly the same line about anarchy in a column in January 2010. True anarchists believe in the ability of humans to get along without the assistance (or interference) of government. It is true democracy — with the codicil that if you are better armed, you have a better chance of living undisturbed by those who seek to control you. No, that’s not a complete encapsulation of the term’s meanings, but it’s more than enough to respond to this unwise scheme. – Daniel C.

JWR Replies: I am strongly in the camp of defending property rights. History has shown that socialism is a slippery slope. Once it starts, it is hard to halt. Although J.I.R is well-intentioned, the distinction between 100 cases of canned chili that is owned by Wal-Mart corporation and a Butler silo full of wheat that is owned by an individual land-owning farmer is likely to be lost, in the midst of a crisis. Once they begin redistributing assets, “The Committee”, or “The Town Council”–or whatever they call themselves–will inevitably start eyeing smaller and smaller increments of foodstuffs or land as worthy of confiscation and redistribution. Recent examples of this excessive collectivist zeal have been embodied by Chairman Mao in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Recognizing human nature and the excesses that total power inevitably engenders , I believe that is preferable to be absolutist in defending property rights. Once the “taking” begins, then who has the power to stop it? Lord Acton said it best: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

I must also reemphasize that charity ceases to be charity when it is directed under brute force or coercion. Conservative Christians are among the most charitable people on the planet. But don’t force us to give. That is just plain theft, and many of us will fight to our deaths to stop it. If I ever have to choose between quasi-anarchous individualism and socialism, then I’ll take the former, not the latter.