barter items 1 of 2

BARTER ITEMS

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I think it is way past time to talk about what items should be bartered and which should not.  This comes up after a couple of comments on the inadvisability of bartering ammunition.  Gott Bless the comments section!  My answer to the question of Should You Barter Ammunition is both yes and no.  As we all know, the Devil is in the details.  As you all act otherwise, however, being in a hurry to get to work and likewise waste your time, is as if you want simple answers to everything and for me to just hurry up and get to the point.  It is almost as if you are a new minion and don’t know me at all.

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I glory in discussing all those details the devils reside in ( notice how clever religion is in turning us into compliant farmer citizens?  Always with the central controlling figure, such as The king or The god or The devil.  Hierarchal societies had hierarchal religions, which is why the old pagan god[S] as in plural had to be verboten ).  The more information you have the better able you are to understand any issue.  Simplicity is desirable as philosophy, not as the basis for deciding on the philosophy.  Binary choices are good for tactics, not for strategy, if that makes more sense.  The simple answer for survival barter is that you barter nothing from the Industrial Age.

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If you have any plans on trading for anything using ANY Industrial Age item ( outside of your tribe ), you are wrong.  It isn’t JUST ammunition, and it isn’t for the reason you think.  The conventional view on barter was “whatever is most desirable”.   So old school ( twenty year old teachings ) advice was to stockpile the crap out of everything cheap.  Rimfire ammunition, sewing needles, reading eyeglasses, and etcetera.  I’m sure I even gave the same advice on non-ammunition items.  The later advice gave the caveat “don’t barter ammunition as it can be used against you”.

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You know who had plenty of ammunition but still lost the war against the traders who sold them that ammo?  The American Indians.  This is a paradigm that many survivalists suffer from, which is a decentralized micro view.  They focus on their particular homestead and leave out most of what surrounds them.  They ignore the macro view.  It is like ONLY balancing your checkbook and adding to a 401k without paying any attention to the economy, fiat currencies, central banks, peak oil and the like.  On a squad ( there won’t be many larger formations for some time during the Dark Ages ) level, the ammunition the enemy has is important.  Above that level it really does not.

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Does the federal government REALLY care that you own a AR-15?  Why should it?  Perhaps the members in a squad of FLEA’s ( federal law enforcement agency ) care, because they are the ones getting shot, but the government as a whole doesn’t really give two craps.  They control your job and they control your money, your food and transportation, a military full of heavy weapons that can decimate your position from outside the range of your small arms, as well as controlling the culture of the people surrounding you who do NOT wish to support you in a guerrilla war because they know the government feeds them.  And your puny souped up rimfire plastic poodle shooter is a concern, how?

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The American Indians were killed by eastern manufacturing and an industrial age navy protecting the sea lanes for ships full of immigrants to replace any White casualties on a 100 to 1 basis.  It didn’t matter how many guns and how much ammunition the indigenous foot soldiers could carry.  And so too goes your battle against outsiders.  Factors other than squad infantry tactics will decide the conflict.  Birth rates, cultural training, geography, and other macro issues.  Concern over your neighbor having ammunition looks at life through the lens of the holler the Hatfield’s and McCoy’s lived in, and ignoring the outside world.

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As a survivalist you must take both the micro and macro view.  That is why I cover both.  That is why evolutionary biology is so fascinating to me.  It sees how individual suffering is species friendly.  It gets you out of your own skin and into a birds eye view.  What is bad for the individual is beneficial to the species as a whole.  Those dirty hippies going on and on about how War, What It Be Good Fo, Yo?, are focused on themselves and fail to see the big picture.  Not that there is anything wrong with looking out after yourself ( after all, what else is survivalism? ).  It is just that you need to focus on the larger view to understand how others will interact with you.

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Bartering for ammunition isn’t bad because you could get shot at by your customer, tactics, it is bad because you have strategically compromised yourself.  You must treat all industrial age items as irreplaceable and an asset that will give you a military advantage ( in the macro sense, as in strengthening your economy and logistics ).  If you are bartering Industrial items for other Industrial items, or far worse Industrial items for sustainable items ( meaning replaceable organic items-food or flesh, wood or labor ), you are doing things wrong.  You must trade sustainable items for industrial items, period.

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Look at, say, the city yonder.  You, as a nomadic herder, trade meat and leather for ammunition.  The city is under no fears from your tribe.  You cannot defeat their mass army.  You only fight in your territory, not theirs.  They need the meat more than you, even if they don’t want to give away the ammunition.  They have the food surplus to trade for that, from groups that don’t hold the monopoly on food production as they do.  In effect, they could use black powder armies, who would still beat your dumb ass even if you were armed with AR’s if you were silly enough to challenge them, and trade you with smokeless ammo for your meat surplus to power their soldiers with superior food.  The ammo they got from grain surplus.

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The losers are the group that had to trade DOWN, rather than up.  Don’t be one of those losers.  Trade sustainable for non-sustainable, not the other way around.  You can always raise more beef on grass.  You can’t gather a surplus of energy to create plate glass ( let alone safety glass ).  The cities might, as they trade grain for coal ( or salt, or whatever ).  True, farming depletes the soil.  But you can, somewhat, mitigate that by better planning and better soil husbandry.  Mineral mining isn’t going to last as long.  So, long term, coal for grain is a losing proposition.  That is what I mean by trading down.  You are using diminishing resources.  Continued tomorrow.

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