consuming to invest 33

CONSUMING TO INVEST 33

Soap And Candle Maker

Soap making and candle making is another two household skills that precludes widespread use from a consumer source, as with tanning.  It wasn’t so long ago that cash money was too scarce to waste on products you could make yourself on the homestead ( the latest surviving example being the Appalachian backwoods of Foxfire book fame.  The area was so mired in poverty there were no jobs to prop up a consumer economy.  But so voracious is the maw of the bankers and corporations [ and the military as it now needed “volunteers“ from the urban or rural slums, and was happy to see a vicious competition for the best and brightest poor boys ] , this area too was pulled unwillingly from self-sufficiency into wage/debt slavery.  Even if the Welfare State had to pay all the “wages”, at least those One Percenters got a bigger paycheck.  It is frightening to contemplate the mental state of the descendents of the aristocracy who might be precluded from owning their own mansion in the Hamptons ).  In today’s present environment it is easy to go buy a forty four cent bar of soap, much easier than cooking up a big batch of bars for hours on end, but of course what is easily forgotten is that once you make nothing but buy everything, the little things add up in price and extend your servitude.  In the long run, it is slightly cheaper in hours worked to buy any one item, albeit of much lower quality than homemade, but far more expensive in hours once you factor in housing and transportation cost.  Things that used to be free ( local material, free, plus manual labor, the cost of food, and perhaps a small metal tool or two for the cost of some barter.  Everything used to be decentralized, and transportation for the majority was shoe leather ). 

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The point here is that you can’t look into the future as a smaller more quaint version of today, the same but with permaculture gardens and ferocious semi-auto armed militiamen.  The money economy will be dead and buried, and home economics and barter will be the totality of trade on the individual level.  The commercial skills you learn and practice will not be a monopoly but a limited luxury item or a barter item.  Limit your expectations and you will be fine.

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Today, fat misshapen office trolls complain bitterly about the ambiguity of fatty foods, as if the agribusinesses are to blamed for their lack of discipline and historical lottery winning.  Fat, as well as sugar ( only available to the common man in quantities sufficient to substitute for better calories after the Caribbean islands were populated with African slaves- this was the early boost to British Empire, as the masses pouring into the new factories were fed more, if not better, and provided an early competitive advantage akin to the American Midwest irrigated corn belt feeding at one time most of the world cheaply ), have been historically scarce.  Scarce to the point, in the case of fat, of being health threatening.  Only an availability of surplus fat will succeed in allowing a commercial enterprise requiring that as the basic feedstock.  The lack of a surplus of fat ( assuming beeswax was in short supply ) not only malnourished peasants, it also saw them unclean to the point of danger.

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