Apocalypse, Or Not?

Members of the American libertarian movement, particularly extremist preppers, are often associated with a belief that a complete breakdown in society is the only outcome from government economic policies and will lead to complete social disintegration. At the center of their concerns is monetary destruction, with other issues, such as the erosion of personal freedom and the right to bear arms, important but peripheral. They cite history, particularly the hyperinflationary collapses, from Rome to Zimbabwe, and now Venezuela. They draw on Austrian economic theory, which fans their dislike of government and their expectation of total chaos.

Properly reasoned economic theory certainly reduces the science to one of black and white conclusions, which suits conclusion-jumpers. But the whole point of it is to explain society’s errors, so that they may be corrected. It is only by understanding the errors of state intervention and socialism, both communistic and fascist, that solutions can be found. Solutions then need to be applied, not taken into a mountain or forest retreat never to be implemented.

The real world does not work on black and white economic theories. It progresses along a muddled course, torn between statist mistakes and society’s unending patience with government intervention. Governments are the source of all wars and wealth destruction, but societies tolerate them. Philosophers have argued over this from Plato versus Aristotle onwards, and we are still here, two and a half millennia later, chewing over the same bones.

History records our philosophical chewing, and Man’s continuing conflict with and tolerances of the state. It records the rise and fall of kings, emperors, dictators, and governments. Hermits and other preppers come and go, either unrecorded or, like Saint Simeon Stylites, noted as little more than historical footnotes. To future generations, prepping will almost certainly be a bygone curiosity, and humanity will continue despite government suppression.

This article is an attempt to rationalize an apparently apocalyptic future into how it is likely to evolve over the coming years. In the absence of a nuclear Armageddon, what we fear, more than anything else, is actually uncertainty and change.

Out with the old

Uncertainty and change are with us all the time. In a truly free market economy, we embrace it because they are driven by our personal economic interests, and it is a continual process. But the desire for change is driven by us only in our role as consumers; as workers or businessmen facing competition for our existing labor and skills, we tend to resist it. It is that side of us that a government taps into.

Modern governments, except where they are overtly mercantilist, don’t do change. Their support, indeed their reason for being, is based on anti-progressive lobbying from both established businesses and socialistic pressure groups. Government economists do not recognize progress, living in a stagnant world of historical statistics. Progressive change interferes with their certainties and is therefore never properly considered.

This is what the welfare states in the West have become, societies managed by anti-progressive governments, nominally responsible to their electorates, but in fact with a life of their own. The interests of governments have long since departed from those of consumers and increasingly conflict with their needs and wants. It is a process that has evolved to the current position over the last hundred years, when governments had understood their role should be strictly limited to identifiable national interests, when government employees deferred to the general public as their civil servants, and importantly, when the national currency was based on money chosen collectively by individuals.

It is, therefore, a much larger issue than just money. It is about the direction of political travel. For individuals, it has become a prolonged road to serfdom, where power and personal freedom have been sequestered by the government from the consumer. The consumer has lost the right to keep his own income, and his preferences are now regarded by the state as subject to its control, to plan and dispose of as it sees fit.

The so-called free world was first ruled by the British and then by the Americans. The roots of both regimes were trade, protected by a government enforcing the rules of property ownership, the certainties of contract law and laws that protected individuals in their interpersonal relationships. As lawmakers, governments now legislate to extend control over their peoples. And now the American government, in the name of American business, is even directing its own citizens not to buy from foreigners and is taxing them if they do so.

It is not the first time the state has interfered with our preferences in this way. The lurch into protectionism that led to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 was one example, and the nationalization policies of Britain’s post-war government another. These were errors from which a retreat proved possible. Today, the West’s democratic system has reached a point from which no ordered retreat back to free markets, to personal freedom and to governments which serve the people and not themselves, seems possible. Change will only come from the ultimate collapse of a system that promotes interests over freedom.