What Would Be Used as Currency in a Post-SHTF World?
“Currency” only has meaning when there is the luxury of a marketplace. If the world is in survival mode then there is no marketplace, there is only survival.
A reasonable example of this was the Pilgrims in Massachusetts between 1620 and 1660.
When the Pilgrims arrived here, they did not use “currency”. There was no marketplace. They were too busy doing what it took to survive to buy and sell. The few tools and small amount of food they had was parceled out according to rules that they had: if you didn’t work, you didn’t eat, unless there were extenuating circumstances. That was, for example, the mother of Peregrine White, the first child born in America, on the Mayflower while it was anchored in Plymouth. Although she wasn’t “idle” she certainly wasn’t doing the kind of heavy labor the others did.
And it was a lot like the apocalypse: 45 of the 102 passengers died the first year, just like they would in an apocalypse and the biggest cause was scurvy and malnutrition. They simply couldn’t find enough to eat and enough of the right foods to eat, just like any apocalypse survivors.
And like survivors of the end of the war, they suffered attacks by roving bands of outsiders who wanted their guns and metal tools and the little livestock they had. Otherwise, the Pilgrims had nothing the Indians wanted. And like any real apocalypse, disease was rampant, particularly Smallpox which wiped out the Indians at a much greater rate than the Pilgrims, but they died too over the ensuing years, at a 30 percent rate annually (The Indians died at a 70 percent rate; by the time of the King Philips War, 3/4s of all the Indians in New England were dead). The only thing that kept the colony from collapsing was the arrival of new ships with more people – and more food.
Over the next 10 years the Pilgrims moved from merely survival to building a society. Unlike the notional drawings we have of them, they did not live in houses. They lived in mud huts made of coppiced branches built into a dome. Sometimes they dug into the hard packed sand and made multi-room caves with wooden doors. Only one actual building existed those first years, and it was a crude meeting house surrounded by a pallisade. The last of the Pilgrim caves was bulldozed away in 1920 because no one thought those things were worth keeping then, a hole in the ground, and bums were by then living in them. Everything they needed was passed around, especially axes and adzes and iron tools used to dig or work wood. Nothing was “owned”. No one could say, “That axe is mine, you can’t use it.” We know exactly, to the number of nai
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
