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Tuesday, February 28, 2017

The federal government – sort of – supports prepping+Valuable Freebies


 

Poor Man Survival

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The federal government – sort of – supports prepping?

 

Did you know that the federal government, led by FEMA, encourages people to stockpile? FEMA’s Ready.gov website contains a host of information on how to prepare for a pending disaster, and radio commercials promote the idea, too. In fact, the government even has a list of 12 foods it suggests people stockpile. So, what’s on the list, and is it sufficient?

 

FEMA’s Ready.gov website contains a host of information on how to prepare for a pending disaster, and radio commercials promote the idea, too. While not the best information in the world, it’s a good starting point for the novice prepper.

Of course, many if not most preppers don’t pay much attention to the FEMA website. Part of that could be because few of us trust the government all that much. But a much bigger part is that the government’s idea of prepping really doesn’t go far enough.


Let’s take a look at the list of Suggested Emergency Food Supplies that FEMA has on their website:

1.     Ready-to-eat canned meats, fruits, vegetables and a can opener

2.     Protein or fruit bars

3.     Dry cereal or granola

4.     Peanut butter

5.     Dried fruit

6.     Nuts

7.     Crackers

8.     Canned juices

9.     Non-perishable pasteurized milk

10.  Vitamins

11.  Food for infants

12.  Comfort/stress foods

That’s it — a dozen things. While all of those are good choices, there’s no way that I would consider them enough. But then, I take a much different view of survival than what FEMA is promoting.

So when FEMA talks about stockpiling food, they only talk about stockpiling three days of it. That’s probably where the idea of a bug-out bag only having three days of food originates. Personally, I don’t feel that three days is anywhere near enough, especially since I have no intention of ending up in a FEMA camp, waiting for the government to decide to let me go.

There were people digging in dumpsters, looking for food, six weeks after both Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy (which occurred in Republican and Democratic administrations). That doesn’t give me a whole lot of faith in FEMA’s abilities. But I’m also concerned that whatever FEMA gives out, comes with a price. The price of government meddling in our lives. That’s a much higher price than paying for my own food, to build a descent stockpile.

Let’s go back to that list for a minute. While the foods contained in it are all good choices for a survival situation, there really isn’t enough there to create actual meals, unless you stockpile canned goods that can be put together to make a meal. While that is possible, it’s not anyone’s first choice. Canned foods do provide nutrition, but they are severely lacking in flavor.

If all you’re talking about is surviving three days, that’s not really an issue. You can live on peanut butter crackers and dried fruit for three days. For that matter, you can live without it for three days, just about as well. But you can’t simply buy more of the foods mentioned on this list and expect to have a three- or six-month stockpile. You’ll have to add other foods to it. I’m not going to talk about what other foods you should stockpile, as I’ve written other articles about it. Try this article or this one for more information.

Another problem with the list is that not all of these foods will store for a prolonged period of time, without rotating your stock. While some, like canned goods will last a long time, there are other things, like breakfast cereal and crackers, which will quickly become stale and unpalatable.

FEMA also suggests that you “choose foods your family will eat.” While that may seem to make sense, most of our families aren’t going to go for a healthy diet of survival food; they’re going to want something tasty. In other words, they’re going to want the same sorts of junk food that they’re used to eating. That doesn’t work, and it’s actually totally contradictory to the list of foods they’ve put together.

I prefer to say, “Figure out how to make the foods you are going to have to stockpile for survival palatable for your family.” This requires figuring out how to take the foods that you stockpile and adapting their flavor to meet your family’s tastes. While not easy, this is actually possible. All you need is a stock of the right spices, plenty of salt and maybe a few sauces, like spaghetti sauce.

You’ll have to do some experimenting to find ways of preparing the survival foods you’re going to stockpile in ways that will be palatable to your family. Take the time to make up some recipes, and make a small batch and test it on your family. If it doesn’t work, try modifying. That usually means adding more spices to give it more flavor.

I stockpile plenty of spaghetti sauce and cream of mushroom soup, as well as the spices used in making my own spaghetti sauce, so that I can restock from tomatoes I grow in my garden.
 
 

So, yes, the FEMA list contains a few items that should be in any stockpile. Just don’t stop there.

Preparing for a financial crash could be the hardest thing to plan for because so many things that we all depend upon will be gone. The infrastructure will probably fall apart. There might even be a general collapse of society.

That's what happened in Argentina. The financial collapse ended up causing a general social collapse. Mob violence became the norm. Vandalism and looting were happening all around.

People who weren't prepared were the hardest hit. Even those who were prepared had a hard time, but at least they had something to fall back on; they had food and water stored for an emergency.

While the collapse will be a horrible event that may even destroy this country. It doesn't have to destroy your life. By preparing now to live without the help of the infrastructure that we now depend on, you can be ready when the collapse happens.

That's the true key to prepping. It's not just about stockpiling food, water and supplies. It's learning how to live independently. More than anything, it's learning how to do things in other ways so that you don't need society as it is now to survive.

Any food stockpile will run out eventually. In order to be ready to face the financial crash, you need more than just a stash of food. You need to be able to produce you own food as well. After all, how many of us can actually stockpile three or more years of food?

What do you think of FEMA’s tips and list? Share your thoughts in the section below:


Source:  Off The Grid News

 

Yours for a productive 2017,

Bruce ‘the Poor Man’

 

 


Additional Resources

Quick intro to homesteading:


 
All states participating:


 
The Anatomy of a Breakdown

The Prepper’s Blueprint: The Step-By-Step Guide To Help You Through Any Disaster

Contact! A Tactical Manual for Post Collapse Survival

DIY-Homemade wood stove


 

FREE-A valuable gift from the Poor Man [feel free to share these PDF files]

The Poor Man’s Essential Survival Package

--The Doctors Protocol: Secrets of Survival

--How to Survive the Coming Economic Collapse

--Guide to Self Reliant Living

--Becoming Self Sufficient for Six Months

--How I Found Freedom in an Un-free World

 
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Thursday, February 23, 2017

Hypocrite Obama Attempted to Rig Israel’s Election: The Progressive-Regressives Are Out of Control


 

Poor Man Survival

Self Reliance tools for independent minded people…


ISSN 2161-5543

A Digest of Urban Survival Resources

 

Hypocrite-in-Chief Obama Attempted to Rig Israel’s Election-The Progressive Regressives Are Out of Control

 


   In 2015 then President Obama used your tax dollars to fund  a campaign to undermine the election process in Israel…He spent $350,000 and our State Department and a Washington DC-based OneVoice Movement firm which hired a political consulting group which had done work on both of Obama’s campaigns to derail Benjamin Netanayhu’s election campaign, Israel’s sitting prime minister…yet he had the nerve to moan about the Russians [even though the US did the same to them in the mid-1980s] supposedly did to our election in 2016.  Hypocrisy at its finest and little covered in our left-wing press.

The rage among the left continues to build and it is being supported in earnest by mainstream personalities in Hollywood and the music industry and the media which harps against Trump daily DESPITE the fact the majority of Americans support safer borders and deporting illegal criminal aliens.  The majority [90,000 seniors, for instance in an AMORC poll conducted last week feel Hollywood should stick to entertainment and STOP blathering about their socialist views].

There’s a growing movement to remove from office Obstructionist lifelong Democratic politicians such as New York’s Chuck Schumer and California’s Nancy Pelosi which many feel have outlived their usefulness in Washington.  They represent the reasons why we need term limits as their views change with the wind.

Trump inherited an already inflamed political and racial divide in this country and everyone is seems wants to restore the status quo [read money & power] which the power elite on both sides of the fence never want to give up [which is why we don’t have the term limits that we should].

According to cyclical analyst Martin Armstrong, things are only going to get worse as protests spread and soon turn to large-scale riots.  Radical leftists, anarchists and self-described ‘anti-fascists’ are vowing to derail Trump by any means necessary.  Funded by anti-American socialists George Soros and others, they are driving social chaos.

Even newly appointed Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos requires the protection of US Marshals when visiting schools as protestors are blocking her path and spitting on her; ignoring decades of failed democrat policies [Detroit schools are a good example of such failures].

Protesters tried to block newly confirmed Education Secretary Betsy DeVos from entering a D.C. school where she was scheduled to speak Feb. 10.

They are using constant, non-stop threats, hoaxes, violence, hatred and maniac Hollywood twits along with a distorted, progressive media to punish not only Trump but everyone who voted for him.

SideBar:

The Flynn “assassination” is just the beginning of what Donald Trump faces from the Deep State and the rest of Imperial City’s swamp creatures jealously guarding their turf against the ultimate political outsider…

Obama left Sally Yates behind to continue the 2016 election by other means. And it's working. The Donald is being rapidly emasculated by the powers that be in the Imperial City due to what can only be described as an audacious and self-evident attack on Trump's Presidency by the Deep State.

As Robert Barnes of LawNewz further explained, Sally Yates, former CIA director John Brennan and a large slice of the Never Trumper intelligence community were systematically engaged in "opposition research" during the campaign and the transition:

According to published reports, someone was eavesdropping, and recording, the conversations of Michael Flynn, while Sally Yates was at the Department of Justice. Sally Yates knew about this eavesdropping, listened in herself (Pellicano-style for those who remember the infamous LA cases), and reported what she heard to others. For Yates to have such access means she herself must have been involved in authorizing its disclosure to political appointees, since she herself is such a political appointee. What justification was there for an Obama appointee to be spying on the conversations of a future Trump appointee?

Consider this little tidbit in The Washington Post. The paper, which once broke Watergate, is now propagating the benefits of Watergate-style surveillance in ways that do make Watergate look like a third-rate effort. (With the) FBI “routinely” monitoring conversations of Americans...... Yates listened to “the intercepted call,” even though Yates knew there was “little chance” of any credible case being made for prosecution under a law “that has never been used in a prosecution.”

According to the Washington Post itself, that is exactly what Yates and the Obama holdovers did day and night during the transition period:

Indeed, the paper details an apparent effort by Yates to misuse her office to launch a full-scale secret investigation of her political opponents, including “intercepting calls” of her political adversaries.

"He Will Die in Jail": Intelligence Apparatus Admits It Is 'Going Nuclear' on Trump
A former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer tweeted on Wednesday that the intelligence community will now be "going nuclear" against Trump.

Deep State? Trump Replaces Flynn with Boss of Super Secret CIA Surveillance Contractor
If Kellogg replaces Flynn, we can undoubtedly expect an expansion of the surveillance state and its associated industries.

Back to the rest of our story…

When talking to someone on the left, they may tell you they are “progressive.” When you ask what they mean by that, they will likely say something along the lines of how they support minorities or the rights of women or children or really anyone other than themselves.

Because they believe they support these other individuals they will also assume they are not only right, but that you are against these things and are wrong. After all, if they are a “progressive” liberal, it obviously means you are regressive.

The major problem with this is liberals are actually feeding themselves into this progressive belief, when in all actuality, they are only lying to themselves about who they are and what they stand for.

In order for the liberal left to actually be for minorities and people of different religions, they need to be open to people with varying thoughts. A person who is Christian may look at certain ideas or topics differently than someone who is Jewish or Islamic. Since they say they support people of different faith, it obviously means they are progressive. The problem here though is they don’t actually support people of varying viewpoints. They prevent speakers with different ideas from appearing on college campuses or they boo a joke because it digs at differing ideas.

Does that sound progressive?

If you don’t think that sounds progressive you’re not alone. You know who else doesn’t? Dave Rubin, a former liberal. Rubin was tired of the hypocritical left and couldn’t stand the party anymore so he left the left. Check out what he has to say about the “progressive” left.
 
 

Senator Webb Admits Left And Media Conspiracy To Destroy Trump, Country Be Damned

Former Senator Webb of VA still has his connections in DC although he is now officially out of politics. His sources have confirmed what we’ve all witnessed and suspected in the aftermath of the presidential campaign, the leftist are out to get Trump by whatever means possible. Senator Webb reveals to ‘Meet the Press’ Chuck Todd the nature of the coordinated attacks.

In true Alinsky “the end justifies the means” manner, the attacks have gotten personal. Webb describes the conspiracy by the leftists, saying, “There is a campaign going on, on the Hill, in the media, in the academia, to personally discredit not only Donald Trump but the people who are around him. And to slow down the process by the way, you and I were talking a minute ago about the confirmation process, it’s slow it down so that by ’18, when the Democrats are very vulnerable, particularly in the Senate, there will not be a record of accomplishment that they can run against [on].

Exposing a nationwide leftist conspiracy against the United States by the Democrats...they are opposing and obstructing, for political purposes, the successful management of the affairs of state being conducted by their opposition, an action intended to diminish the situation of, effectively harm, our nation for political benefit. If that’s not treason it’s certainly enough to prevent them from being reelected. The trick is to make enough voters aware of their actions and the motivations behind them.

Democrats count on an uninformed and self-serving dependent class of voters for their support and with the media being part of the conspiracy, it’s going to be extremely challenging to get the word out. They’ve also got social media outlets, particularly Facebook, censoring content of those conservative sites outside of the mainstream media, in pursuit of controlling the type and amount of information available to the public.

This revelation should be national news. All it got from Chuck Todd, who must certainly be one of the anonymous media members that Webb was referring to…


Face the Nation host John Dickerson stepped in something on the way into the studio this morning. As he scraped it off his shoe he discovered it was a pile of up-Chuck Schumer, the Democratic plague of New YorkObstructionist Schumer Knows Best – Trump Is Always Wrong, Automatically

 
Many of these protesters are not old enough to even vote. Their teachers allow them to cut class to protest against Trump. When asked what they are protesting about, they do not even understand the issues…

 
This will be the BIGGEST spike in civil unrest in American history, It is already the biggest with regard to trying to block and overthrow the Trump Administration and Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer are all encouraging this violence.

 
Example of Mis-Information
 
 
 


 



 

Yours for better living,

Bruce , the Poor Man

A Final Note…

You Have a 16-Cylinder Brain-Learn How to Use It and Reawaken the Genius Inside You!

 



Learn how to improve your thinking skills...

Contributors and subscribers enable the Poor Man Survivor to post 150+ free essays annually. It is for this reason they are Heroes and Heroines of New Media. Without your financial support, the free content would disappear for the simple reason that I cannot keep body and soul together on my meager book sales & ecommerce alone.

Additional Resources

Contact! A Tactical Manual for Post Collapse Survival

  
5 ways to reduce food waste by 20%




 
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Tuesday, February 21, 2017

US Economic Freedom & Democratic Ideals Hits Historic Lows


Poor Man Survival

Self Reliance tools for independent minded people…


ISSN 2161-5543

A Digest of Urban Survival Resources
 
 

U.S. Economic Freedom Hits Historic Low...

   The United States is no longer among the world’s top 15 freest economies. In fact, according to an annual index released by the Heritage Foundation on Wednesday, the U.S. fell from being the sixth-freest economy in the world when President Barack Obama took office in 2009 to being the 17th freest economy in the world today.

The U.S. economic freedom score for 2017 was 75.1 out of 100. This means economic freedom in the U.S. has fallen to its lowest level since the Heritage Foundation started keeping track in 1995. America now ranks behind such nations as Chile, Estonia, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. Since the Heritage Foundation ranks countries with scores above 80 as economically “free,” it has only ranked the U.S. as “mostly free” since 2009.

The Heritage economic freedom index is calculated based on 12 factors of economic freedom, including property rights, government spending, freedom from corruption, fiscal freedom, monetary freedom, business freedom, labor freedom, trade freedom, investment freedom and financial freedom. The 2017 report lists large budget deficits, an enormous national debt, a substantial expansion of government bureaucracy and an increased tax burden as contributing factors to the decline in America’s economic freedom.

Another index of economic freedom, published by the Fraser Institute, shows that the U.S. fell from being second freest economy in 1980 to being the 16th freest economy in 2014. According to this assessment, U.S. economic freedom actually rose from 1980 to 2000 but has been in steady decline since the turn of the millennium.

The Fraser Institute reports that the U.S. economic freedom index fell from 8.07 to 7.75 between 1980 and 2014, while China’s economic freedom index rose from 3.64 to 6.45 during the same time period. As the U.S. turns its back on Adam Smith-style capitalism and China turns its back on Mao Zedong-style communism, both nations are adopting a mixed socialist market economy where property is privately owned but micromanaged by government bureaucrats.

Germany and most members of the European Union also have economic freedom scores in the “moderately free” zone, a category associated with mixed socialist market economies and authoritarian bureaucracies.

For the past two centuries, the form of government championed by Britain and America—a form of government that has at its heart some important biblical principles—has spread throughout the Western world. Yet, in recent years, nations around the globe have been turning their back on the Anglo-American methods of economic management.

Even many key American officials have adopted an approach similar to Barack Obama’s philosophy that nations should not debate the ideologies of capitalism and communism, but instead should pursue a mixed economy that uses bits of Communist theory and bits of capitalist theory.
 
 

Democracy Is Dying

By Richard Palmer

Across the world, democracy is dying. Self-government—once viewed as the ideal of freedom and the only way to fairly administer a country—to the younger generation has become “meh.”

In the United States, only 30 percent of those born in the 1980s say it is “essential” to live in a democracy, according to data from the World Values Survey (1995–2014). Only 19 percent of them say a military takeover, in the case of the government being incompetent or failing to do its job, is not legitimate in a democracy. Only one third of them say civil rights are “absolutely essential.” In 2015, one in six said they were fine with a military coup. (In 1995, that number was one in 16.) A 2011 survey found that nearly a quarter of young people thought democracy was a “bad” or “very bad” way to run the country.

“Three decades ago, most scholars simply assumed that the Soviet Union would remain stable,” wrote Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk—the academics who compiled these statistics—in the Journal of Democracy. “This assumption was suddenly proven false. Today, we have even greater confidence in the durability of the world’s affluent, consolidated democracies. But do we have good grounds for our democratic self-confidence?” (July 2016).

“What we find is deeply concerning,” they warned. “Citizens in a number of supposedly consolidated democracies in North America and Western Europe have not only grown more critical of their political leaders. Rather, they have also become more cynical about the value of democracy as a political system, less hopeful that anything they do might influence public policy, and more willing to express support for authoritarian alternatives. The crisis of democratic legitimacy extends across a much wider set of indicators than previously appreciated.”

Similar data shows the same trend forming in Sweden, Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

The death of democracy has already gone beyond the theoretical. It is affecting ballot boxes across the world. Everywhere you look, you clearly see early warning signs of the death of democracy. And biblical prophecy strongly indicates that this trend is going to accelerate.

Pirates


Since World War ii, the Western world has come to a consensus on what a democracy should look like: a system of government that has been termed liberal democracy. The West dreamed of spreading this enlightened ideal of representative self-government around the world, pushing back socialism, communism and/or dictatorships and tyrannies and giving everyone worldwide the freedom to govern themselves.

But not only has the West failed to export its prized product, it is rotting on its own shelves. Democracy in Britain, Europe, America and beyond is crumbling. This has been visible in decade-long trends and in recent elections. And it is more than a rejection of certain politicians or parties. It shows a world no longer happy with the way government works, even in free societies. It shows a world where voters are so dissatisfied with democracy that they are willing to conduct live experiments on themselves with alternative and even radical forms of government.

One alternative is the pirates. On Oct. 29, 2016, pirates came close to taking over Iceland. These were not literal pirates, but the Icelandic Pirate Party.

The pirate movement is one of the newest in politics. It morphed from a protest against restrictive online copyright enforcement to a political movement, promoting the right to privacy, government transparency and free speech.

The party was founded just four years ago, but in October it won 15 percent of the vote, making it the third most popular party in Iceland. That’s explosive growth.

Like almost everywhere else in the world, it’s easy to see why Icelandic voters have so forcefully rejected politics as usual. Earlier in 2016, the Panama papers revealed massive corruption at the top of Iceland’s government, leading to the resignation of the prime minister.

A key platform of the pirate parties in Iceland and across Europe—and the biggest way they reject “liberal democracy”—is their support for direct democracy. Just about all of the West’s liberal democracies are representative democracies. The people choose a representative; the representative is charged with lawmaking, judging or administering the way that he thinks best within the constitution; and if voters disagree, they vote him out at the end of his term—if not sooner.

But when elected representatives are as corrupt as the Panama papers, Wikileaks and other leaks reveal, it’s easy to see why voters want something different. Under direct democracy, citizens vote directly on the policies themselves, cutting out the middleman.

Beppe Grillo, the former comedian who is looking more and more like the future prime minister of Italy, leads a direct democracy group: the Five Star Movement. The Netherlands passed a law last year that allows petitions to trigger referenda on legislation.

Peasants


At the same time the pirates assaulted Iceland, a farmers’ party stormed to power in Lithuania in two rounds of elections, held on October 9 and 23. Before the election, the Peasant and Greens Union held just one seat in parliament. Now it is the largest party, with 54.

Once again there is a new party; once again people are fed up with politics as usual. But instead of giving the people more power, this coalition wants to give them less. One of the core policies of the Peasant and Greens Union is to create a technocratic government. Because elected politicians have made a big mess, it reasons, Lithuania needs to appoint experts to deal with it.

This too is an idea that has spread far and is gaining more popularity after America’s presidential election. “The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States may have signaled the death of the closest thing we have to a religion in politics,” wrote former British Conservative mp Matthew Parris. “On both sides of the Atlantic, democracy risks being knocked from the high altar as an unmitigated and unquestioned good” (Spectator, Nov. 9, 2016).

Jason Brennan, a political philosopher at Georgetown University, has just written a book called Against Democracy. He advocates instead for an epistocracy—meaning rule by the knowledgeable. “Trump’s victory is the victory of the uninformed,” he wrote in Foreign Policy. “But, to be fair, Clinton’s victory would also have been. Democracy is the rule of the people, but the people are in many ways unfit to rule” (Nov. 10, 2016).

Clearly, it’s not just young people souring on democracy. Many of the elites have too.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are really part of this same movement. The European Union has followed this approach for decades. In America, politicians from both sides of the aisle have allowed the number of unelected bureaucrats in America to grow to the point that over 2.5 million non-military personnel now work in the executive branch. They are appointed, not elected. Yet this sprawling mass of bureaucrats includes myriad agencies that have the power to pass laws, try cases and enforce punishments. They call these laws “regulations.” And the average citizen has little to no recourse against this bureaucratic state.

The more control these bureaucrats have, the less control the people have. The natural allies of bureaucrats, technocrats, epistocrats and their related synonyms are leftists, because they all want the same solution: big government.

‘Illiberal Democracy’


But not everyone is happy about big government. And the fight-back is leading to another movement: “illiberal democracy.” This was a term used by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to describe those who, like himself and Donald Trump, are democratic but reject many of the norms of the modern Western state. They do things that some consider beyond the pale, things that democratic leaders should never do, no matter how strong their mandate.

These “illiberal” democracies tend to be built around strongmen: leaders who are democratically elected but who greatly emphasize their personal power to solve their nation’s problems.

In many ways, this is the hardest trend to describe, because so much is distorted. The left has gained control of many of the levers of power in liberal democracy. It has used the bureaucracies, the judiciaries, the media, the schools and even central banks to move nations to the left. When leaders on the right want to change their country’s direction, they can only do so by “interfering” with the leftist policies of these bureaucracies, judiciaries, government-owned broadcasters, etc. When they do this, the left screams blue murder.

But all this crying wolf is dangerous. It makes it hard to see where leaders are just pushing back against leftist control, and where they are genuinely altering the government toward illiberalism or oppression. Hungary and Poland are two governments singled out as being “illiberal democracies.” Are they truly illiberal? There is certainly some concerning news. But with all the heated rhetoric, it’s hard to tell what is really going on. A person is not a Nazi because he criticizes the decision-making of a central bank or because he wants to see an out-of-control supreme court reined in. The left’s smears against Poland, Hungary and the Trump administration make it harder to detect if and when these governments do, in fact, take actions that are genuinely dangerous.

Escalation


These movements all feed off each other. The more the elites take power, the more people are determined to take it back, and vice versa.

Italy was forced into a technocratic government from 2011 to 2013. During that time, the direct democracy-supporting Five Star Movement exploded in popularity in a major reaction against technocracy. The first time the Dutch used their new powers of direct democracy, it was to strike down an EU treaty with Ukraine—a strike aimed at the technocrats in the EU. However, the technocrats quickly began working on a method they hope the Dutch government will use to ignore the vote.

Many in Britain hate the EU for its anti-democratic nature and elitism. And when Britain voted to leave in a rare instance reminiscent of direct democracy, this only proved to the elites that the people do not deserve and cannot handle the power to govern themselves.

Direct democracy and illiberal democracy have some common ground. One wants to give power directly to the people, whereas the other trusts a single individual to smash the status quo. But both are quickly opposed by the elites. The elites oppose the “illiberals” or “the people” grabbing power, so they seek to grab more power back—and must become more extreme in order to do so.

These countries are just examples from the most recent elections. They are not rare. A new political party winning support in a European nation has become so common that it barely makes the news. Greece, Lithuania, Iceland, Portugal, Spain, France, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden are all major examples of this trend. That represents a lot of people who are dangerously dissatisfied with the status quo of modern democracy.

It is important to recognize that one can make legitimately strong criticisms about all these alternatives. America’s founders rejected direct democracy for good reasons. Rule by elites concentrates power in the hands of the few; the best-laid plans of expert bureaucrats gang aft agley—go often askew. As F. A. Hayek put it, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” Strongmen can, and often have, become strong dictators.

Still, none of these movements are Nazis. All are supported by well-meaning people, most of whom would protest any suggestion that they are anti-democratic. But their support all rises from some kind of sense that the system is broken, and that we need to make big changes to the way we’re doing things. They share many views of the 25 percent of young people who believe that democracy is “bad,” even if they might reject that conclusion. They are all symptoms of the deep dissatisfaction with the way Western government works, and the sense that democracy has let us down.

Once even a significant minority starts to lose hope in democracy, the trend is hard to stop. It creates its own vicious cycle. In the 1930s, upstart parties rose with similar speed to those that are rising today. Their rise meant the established parties no longer held enough votes to form governments, and the regular coalitions no longer worked. Democracies became even more dysfunctional, more people became convinced of the need for something else, and the spiral worsened.

Furthermore, the problems building in today’s world will only get worse. Europe’s economic crisis continues to rumble on with no sign of a solution. Parts of Europe are stagnating, with Great Depression levels of unemployment. Even Germany, Europe’s engine of growth, seems likely to encounter an economic crisis. America is swimming in debt and is poised for disaster.

If masses are rejecting the system now, how much worse will the situation get when millions more find themselves without work? When millions of families have real worries about whether they’ll be able to keep their home?

Returning to the academics we started with, Public Radio International reported on an interview with Yascha Mounk, writing, “Mounk believes at least part of the explanation for the disenchantment with democracy is economic. Most citizens of established liberal democracies have been contending with stagnant or falling incomes for the past 20 or 30 years. They may believe the system has failed them, while their children face an even more uncertain future” (Nov. 29, 2016).

An economic crash would make that future radically less certain. And the sense that the system has failed would explode into chaos or anarchy.

Why Governments Fail


The global dissatisfaction ties in with a great many forecasts that the Poor Man has made for a decade: the breakdown of the political order in the United States; the rise of strongmen in Asia; Europe’s turn toward nationalism; the creation of a new, undemocratic European superstate.

Underlying all this is a simple cause: Man simply has no good way of ruling over man. He does not have the capacity. None of man’s governments has created or can create peace, stability and order. We are now seeing the latest round of men deciding that yesterday’s perfect ideal of a system has failed, and scurrying around to find tomorrow’s new ideal.

It is a failure not of politics but of human nature. No system eliminates greed and selfishness.

But that doesn’t mean that all systems of government are equally bad. Some do a much better job than others of restraining selfish human nature.

A simple understanding of history should warn of the dangers in rejecting liberal democracy and embracing alternatives. Looking at the broad sweep of history, most people in the West have never had it so good. The vast majority of mankind for the vast majority of history has lacked the freedoms that most of us take for granted.

As Winston Churchill put it, “Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

America’s Founding Fathers knew some of the problems with human nature. They designed a system of government that would restrain it. Government in the rest of the English-speaking world and beyond grew out of a similar tradition. After World War ii, many of the rest of the world’s democracies were founded on similar principles.

All these alternatives to liberal democracy fail to protect from the dangers of human nature. Illiberal democracy concentrates power in one strongman and frees him of checks and balances. That’s great if that man has little of the selfish, greedy, corrupt human nature. And what if that power corrupts him? It always does. And what about his successor? Technocracy gives power to a few elites, again, with few checks or balances. They become a gang of heavyweights that is almost impossible to rein in—without resorting to a strongman. Yet these experts still have the same human nature that has given liberal democracy such a bad rap.

Direct democracy is the least tried of all the alternatives. Its experiment in ancient Greece was an absolute disaster. Direct democracy—mob rule—has proven dangerous and volatile. Regardless of how it would work in practice in a modern setting, it certainly would not solve the problems caused by human nature.

History and human nature, then, warn us to beware. Bible prophecy gives us an even more specific reason.





A Dangerous Ending


 The last two centuries have been Anglo-American centuries. The form of government championed by these nations—a form of government that has at its heart some important biblical principles—has spread throughout the Western world.

This global falling out with the Anglo-American method of government is in tandem with the decline of Britain and America.

Now, we are witnessing the final failures of these man-devised governments. Human experiments in government have ultimately failed, every single time. And today’s radical experiments on live patients in a world full of terror and weapons of mass destruction will culminate in the ultimate lesson: Human beings actually are incapable of governing themselves.

This final failure will force us to accept that fact. The rise of pirates, peasants and Donald Trump shows that we are desperate for alternatives. We are not yet desperate enough to consider the government of God as an alternative. But when this experiment finally ends, we will be.

 

From the February 2017 Trumpet Print Edition and the Poor Man Survivor

 

 


Yours for another revolution,

Bruce ‘the Poor Man’

 

Post Script…

Contributors and subscribers enable the Poor Man Survivor to post 150+ free essays & free reports that I provide annually. It is for this reason they are Heroes and Heroines of New Media. Without your financial support, the free content would disappear for the simple reason that I cannot keep body and soul together on my meager book sales & ecommerce alone.  You can make a donation at top of this page via PayPal.

 

Additional Resources

The Anatomy of a Breakdown

The Prepper’s Blueprint: The Step-By-Step Guide To Help You Through Any Disaster

Contact! A Tactical Manual for Post Collapse Survival

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You Have a 16-Cylinder Brain-Learn How to Use It and Reawaken the Genius Inside You!

 



 

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