Another reason to store food

Copyright 2013 by John T. Reed

My book How to Protect Your Life Savings from Hyperinflation & Depression urges readers to buy everything they will ever need for the rest of their lives now. Logically, that would protect you from price increases.

A big part of that is food storage and there are a number of tricks to that. Some involve buying food with extremely long shelf lives like Mormon dry pack #10 cans and freeze-dried #10 cans. You should also have shorter-lived food, but you have to rotate that stuff so that you use it before it goes bad. With Mormon dry pack and freeze-dried—which lasts for 10 to 30 years—you can just buy it and forget it. You need more than just Mormon and freeze-dried for the sake of variety and taste at least for the first six months or so that you have to use it. (We’re talking pantry and refrigerated and frozen foods in everyday packaging. You cannot dry pack or freeze dry every type of food into #10 cans.)

Hyperinflation danger is not the only reason to buy a large supply of long-shelf-life food. It may also be useful or even crucial in the event of a natural disaster, war, depression, power outage, personal financial tragedy like loss of job or bankruptcy or your kid getting into an Ivy League college, and so on.

Then there is the “food bomb.” There was an article about it in the 1/23/13 Wall Street Journal. Time to Defuse the ‘Food Bomb’ in Farm Policy.

During the Depression and after World War II, Democrats created two laws that guarantee farmers the prices that existed from 1910-14 which was one of the greatest times to be a farmer. Those laws still exist and are triggered whenever Congress does not enact a new farm bill before the old one expires. Lately, with the brinkmanship that has become the new normal in Congress, we have been getting closer and closer to triggering those old laws. They would raise food prices by 40% to 100%.

As I explained in my book about hyperinflation and depression, both inflation and deflation displease the public, albeit different segments depending upon whether you are buying or selling the item in question. The standard reaction of the sleazy morons in Congress is to outlaw market prices. During inflation, they use price controls, which are ceilings. During deflation, a.k.a. depression, they use floors like the minimum wage, crop price supports, pro-union laws, Social Security, and so on. The food bomb was created during Depression/deflation and they are floors on food prices—very high floors.

If the game of chicken played nowadays by the Democrats and Republicans in Congress should result in the food bomb exploding, you would be saved by your hyperinflation stored food. The food bomb is not hyperinflation per se, but whether Congress is causing price increases by “printing” too much money to buy senior citizen votes or forcing food prices up with high floors to buy farmer votes makes little difference to you.

Ironically, if the food bomb were triggered, farmers would plant more crops to cash in. That would force the government to buy with taxpayers’ money, and store—there’s that word again—the excess food. When I was a cadet at West Point in the 1960s, we always had real butter, which I had never tasted before West Point. I loved it. Where did the Army get the money to buy that luxury? It was from stockpiles the U.S. government had to buy pursuant to these dopey “screw the taxpayers to buy votes from farmers” laws.

The federal government of the U.S. is imploding in many ways. You can keep buying luxury items that you don’t need, or you can set aside a little money—we’re only talking thousands of dollars here—in the form of stored food that you may later desperately need. Please buy and store a couple of years worth of food before you buy any more luxury items.

Fundamentally, the coming bankruptcy of the U.S. government and the total destruction of the U.S. dollar requires you to think about and create Plans B, C, D, and E, if not F, G, and H. In the past, Plan A and and maybe an occasional Plan B was enough. Not any more.

I am not a survivalist or doomsday prepper. Rather, I am a student of history pursuant to Santana’s admonition that those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it. I have studied the history of past inflations and deflations in the world. If you have not, trust me. Take two or three thousand dollars and spend it on stored food now. What’s the worst that can happen if you somehow never encounter any need for it? You can skip going to the grocery store a number of times in the future.

Denial is not a plan.