PrepperNomics 107: Bartering in the Post-Apocalyptic World
One of the things I like about writing
for 3BY is that Salty doesn’t require that I always agree with him. So
naturally, my post on bartering comes up shortly after he has a post on guns and ammo as barter items. My difference of opinion may not be what you are expecting, so please read on.
Barter makes sense in the absence of a
functioning currency. Currently we have a functioning currency, but in a
SHTF scenario, perhaps we won’t.
To most people that seems pretty
remote. To not have a functioning currency, not only must the US dollar
cease to function, but no other currency like the Yen or the Euro be
available as a substitute. On the other hand, preppers concern
themselves with Low Probability Events.
Consequently, the subject of Barter comes up in prepper circles, based
on the assumption that the US dollar and other currencies no longer
function post-Armageddon. The debate then turns to what goods would
work as barter goods.
Personally, I have always felt that the
goods you would want to trade would be whatever you had an excess of.
If things were so bad that cash no longer worked, you would want to
trade for whatever you were short of, and pay in whatever you had an
excess of. That is barter.
The difficulty with a barter economy is
that for anything to have value, you must find a person who needs it,
and has something acceptable to you to trade. With a functioning
currency, half of that equation is taken care of, as money is virtually
always acceptable for an exchange. Barter is much less convenient than a
functioning monetary system, because both sides must want whatever
goods the other is willing to trade.
Middlemen are the only people in a
position to really know value in a barter economy, and have the contacts
to know who needs what. That is because it is actually a lot of work
to figure out values in terms where the trade is goods for goods, not
goods for currency.
Transportation is also an issue. You
have to get the trade goods from where you have stored them, to the
location your buyer wants them. If things are so broken down that money
no longer works, it is unlikely that transit systems, particularly fuel
hungry trucks, will be operating.
As a result, our conditions for barter to
be in use will consist of a SHTF event so severe that our monetary
system is no longer functioning, transportation systems that are broken
down, but there is enough need for, and supply of, goods that a trading
system arises and there is enough accessible population that you can
find a local market that can both supply goods you need, and provide a
marketplace for the goods you wish to sell. This is a somewhat
restrictive set of conditions. 😊
Categories
If a barter economy does begin to develop, what do you barter? If you recall our Supply Categories,
you’ll find that despite your best efforts, you have an excess supply
of some items vs. other items where you come up short. For instance,
you may have planned for a year long event, but you find your estimates
were off, and you’ll run out of food in 10 months. However, you have an
18 month supply of hygiene items. The reason for this is because no
matter how hard you try, your estimation of how much you need will be a
bit off, in some cases too high, and other cases too low.
A hypothetical barter transaction you
would like to make is to pay for food with hygiene items. You need to
find someone who has the opposite situation. Alternatively, you could
find someone with food, learn what they needed and perhaps trade your
hygiene supplies for whatever the party with extra food wanted. Without
a currency this rapidly becomes time consuming at best. This is really
inconvenient, so there will be tremendous pressure to implement a
currency in our post-apocalyptic economy.
Precious Metals
Some suggest gold and silver as a
solution, but gold and silver have functioned as currencies in the past,
so using gold and silver, particularly coins, is simply returning to a
traditional currency, not barter. I’ve previously written about Precious Metals.
The only point I wish to make here is that trading precious metals is
not true barter because barter is trading goods for goods, not trading
for a currency and precious metals in this example are simply
substitution precious metals for dollars.
As I suggested in the Precious Metals
post, storing precious metals for use in a SHTF scenario is risky
because the use of precious metals as a currency might not develop, and
the goods you would want to acquire might actually be cheaper today than
the precious metals, making purchase of goods now the better plan.
Ammunition
In some prepper novels, ammunition gets
used first as a barter item, and evolves into a pseudo-currency.
Ammunition does have the advantage of being durable and relatively
compact, making transportation to market easy, but there is no guarantee
that a barter economy would develop or that ammunition would become a
substitute currency. There is also the concern of the ammunition being
used against you. The good news about ammunition is that if a new
currency were to appear and barter was not needed, one could always just
sell the ammunition for the new currency. The same is true if SHTF
never happens.
Conclusion
Barter is a consideration for preppers,
but predicting the type of disaster that will lead to a barter economy
is a challenge. Even if we experience that type of event, predicting
what will make an effective barter good is another challenge, so you are
building predictions on top of predictions when you start to set aside
something specifically for barter. The better plan is to prep with the
supplies you need, and plan on barter simply to balance things out,
trading excesses in order to acquire shortage goods.
So how does this depart from Salty’s
post? I am saying that you barter what you have an excess of, so for
bartering guns and ammo to work, as Salty suggests, you must have an
excess of guns and ammo. I suspect Salty may have an excess, but there
is really no way to tell until you find out if life in Dystopia requires
more or less than you planned. As with all of our prepper goods a
specific prepper group may have an excess of guns and ammo, or a
shortage. For barter to work somebody with an excess has to find
someone with a shortage.
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