Happy Friday, TDVers! How was your week? Chaos for our friends to the north in Kanada where a train carrying oil derailed and exploded, and people EVAPORATED in the inferno. All this with Kanadian government over-regulation, too. And then an epic storm hit Toronto, sending the climate change choir screaming for Kyoto to save them. Yeesh. You know where weather is beautiful and government doesn’t invade your life? Galt’s Gulch Chile. Just sayin’.
Want to join in the discourse? Send your questions, comments, queries, and concerns to tdv@dollarvigilante.com, comment on a post, or get on the forums.
On to the feedback…
SKILLS FOR THE DOLLAR COLLAPSE
Dear TDV,
If one does believe fundamentally that the dollar and all/most fiat currencies are going to collapse what skill sets would you recommend people be obtaining to get of out the US? I have a degree in industrial hygiene and safety.
Matt M.
Jeff’s Response:
Hi Matt,
90% of things that most people in the US learn in schools is either not relevant to any real life needs or is outright wrong. In fact, school is rarely relevant to any real-life skill or need. Unfortunately, in the US, they've made it so you must go to school for almost anything now (the education-industrial complex) including being a hair stylist! In a natural, free-market world, you'd just apprentice for someone in the work you wish to do. That, also, in the US, is mostly outlawed to "protect" people and ensure they at least get a minimum wage (which does nothing but destroy job opportunities).
By far the best way to live is as an entrepreneur. If you understand how to identify market needs and grow a company to meet those needs then you'll always have a "job". You could drop me on the ground on almost any country on Earth with two months worth of living expenses and I'd likely find a way to help a business grow or identify a business opportunity and get it started.
Unfortunately, yet again, the in US, the last thing you'll ever be taught in skool is how to be an entrepreneur. Even business school doesn't teach you how to be an entrepreneur, they teach you how to work in an already established business. That's partially because there is really no way to teach true entreprenurialism in school. The only way to learn, as with most things, is to do it.
That's why you hear millions of college students who have graduated complaining they can't "get a job" because they have no real world experience. The concept of 16 years of schooling is so beyond ridiculous I can't even begin to describe it. My children are 6 and 8 and they both already have come up with a number of business ideas and I will support them on it.
Other than that, just keep learning every day. I often see people like security guards sitting around at a desk, doing nothing, and wonder why they don't have a book (or internet) in front of them learning a new language (Spanish should be high on anyone's list) or learning new things.
The problem with the Western mindset is that they think the school years are for learning and then after that, you just stop learning. Learning is a lifelong occupation. Just try to learn something new every day and after years it really starts to add up. Then, when opportunities do arise, there will be a good chance that you will have the knowledge to take advantage of them.
COMPLIANCE: TRUTH IN FICTION?
Jeff/Gary,
I’d like to recommend to you (and the TDV readers at large) watch a movie called Compliance which came out in 2012. While the movie is fiction, I really felt like it EPITOMIZED everything that is wrong with the USSA at the present time—the blind allegiance to authority by the masses, the inability of the populace to engage in critical thought (i.e. the complete absence of logic and rational thought), with a sub-theme of how the foods we eat are total and utter poison, the lack of any accountability and the “embracing of victimhood” by the powers that be. These themes are all brilliantly purveyed against the backdrop of a “prank phone call gone awry” plot. It’s a short movie—89 minutes. Just thought you all would enjoy.
Dylan
Gary's Response:
I hadn't heard about Compliance. I am usually way too affected by well done movies. So I tend to avoid them in favor movies about comic book superheroes or zombies. I prefer escapism to watching plausible dramatizations of horrible things that could happen in this sad, sick world. But I did watch Compliance after I read your email, Dylan.
"Enjoy" is not the right word. But I was impressed by the movie. Apparently I'm not the only one. After I watched it I checked it out on Rotten Tomatoes and found it got an 89% rating among critics. I notice that among viewers, however, the rating is only 63%. I think there's something to explore there…
I would say that the much lower viewer rating is a result of people realizing that this is a good movie…while feeling profound discomfort because they know that they would have acted just like that store manager. They would have submitted to the voice of authority without thinking to question until things had gone way too far. They would have licked boots, followed orders and allowed an atrocity to take place. We know from the Milgram experiments that most people would torture and kill perfect strangers as long as somebody in authority told them to.
This movie is, of course, like watching footage from the Milgram experiments. Ann Dowd did an amazing job in the role of the compliant store manager. She made it clear that she was standing in for any of the dim-witted, public school-educated, TV-watching middle Americans who trust their government and its praetorians no matter how outrageous their crimes.
And these same Americans will be dutifully helping the authorities out in this mature version of the police surveillance state. They will be saying something when they see something…like when you are growing or storing food illegally in the grips of a shortage-producing currency collapse…or when you store precious metals after that becomes illegal, too. Personally, I don't want to be calling these jingoistic statist sheep my neighbors for the rest of my life. Thank god for Galt's Gulch.
DESCENSION IN THE RANKS?
I was wondering if there are any major issues upon which the brilliant minds at TDV simply do not agree? Or are you all of the same mindset like the Borg on Star Trek? Great articles, keep up the good work!
Jeff S.
Michigan, USSA
Gary's Response:
Ha! You got a few funny emails flying around the office with this one, Jeff. We are crazily in sync on matters of philosophy, ethics, economics and politics. We're all staunchly Austrian in our economic thought and anarchist in our political leanings. We do have differences in opinion on things like fashion, what makes a woman attractive, which climates are best, who makes the best burger, which drugs are best, and the like. In other words, we are being the change we want to see. The whole world should be free market anarchist, giving up on the immoral aggression of politics interfering with voluntary human interaction and the order which arises spontaneously from it. The difference in tastes will remain — as they do among the TDV crew — while the solid moral bedrock of non-aggression remains at the center.
But there is a major difference in opinion among us that goes a long way beyond taste. And your brown TDV editor is at the center of it. I speak, of course, of remaining in the USSA…
Editor-in-chief, Jeff Berwick and legal correspondent, Jim Karger, have been consistenly and strenuously vocal in their objections to my remaining in the belly of the beast. They sincerely worry for my safety. Granted both managing editor, Redmond Weissenberger and senior analyst, Ed Bugos, live in Kanada, and that's just not as offensive or worrisome as living in the beating heart of the greatest evil among the nation-states. The scholarly James Guzman also lives in Acapulco not terribly far from Jeff Berwick.
Why, oh why (!!?), they ask, do I insist on living here when I have other options. It's…complicated… But it mostly has to do with my penchant for white women with American accents. It also lets me keep my "boots on the ground" to give advice on surviving and thriving in the USSA in the TDV Homegrown newsletter. But I know I have to leave eventually. This place is done. And it sucks. The populace are a bunch of cowed tax livestock who love their slavery. They are pretty damned detestable. Luckily, there is a place like Galt's Gulch, Chile, waiting when I've finally had enough.
