After the COLLAPSE - Will You STOOP to THIS LEVEL to Survive?

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Time: Present Day     Place: Venezuela 

“Laboratory assistant Mary Noriega must stand in line for hours with 1,500 others just to buy food, “as soldiers with side arms checked identification cards to make sure no one tried to buy basic items more than once or twice a week.”

Ms. Noriega has had to barter with neighbors to put food on the table.

As the Times reports shortages and long lines are a way of life in Venezuela, but with the plunge in oil, the government has sent troops to patrol huge lines snaking for blocks. Some states have barred people from waiting outside stores overnight, and government officials are posted near entrances, ready to arrest shoppers who cheat the rationing system.

 

Every purchase was entered into a database, ensuring that shoppers did not try to buy the same regulated staples at the chain for at least seven days.

Soldiers patrolled the line outside, police officers were stationed inside and government officials checked identification cards, looking for fake ones that could be used to cheat the rationing system — or for immigrants with expired visas. An official from the immigration and identification service said that offenders would be arrested.

Healthcare has taken a considerable hit with supplies running out. Operating rooms have been shut down for months despite hundreds of patients on the waiting list for procedures. At one private clinic a surgeon was able to keep the operating room open by smuggling in essential drugs from the U.S.

Germany

Time: 1920s:

However, memories run deep when the exchange from marks to dollars goes from 4.2 to one in 1914 to 4.2 trillion marks to the dollar by November 1923.  

For no single household is allowed more than five eggs a week; therefore the young people will enter the shop singly, one after another, under assumed names, and thus wring twenty eggs from the shopkeeper for the Cornelius family.

In his book The Downfall of Money:Germany’s Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class Frederick Taylor writes “people with average incomes, and no access to agricultural produce or foreign exchange, were forced to hunt and queue for food–both because their incomes more often than not did not stretch to buying what they wanted on a particular day but also because there was, as the hyperinflation tightened its grip, a genuine shortage of food.”

Farmers didn’t want to part with their produce in exchange for worthless paper.  ‘In what was rapidly becoming a barter economy, the agile and the cunning, not to mention dishonest, citizen was top of the Darwinian heap,” writes Taylor. Doctors “in rural areas demanded payment in food from farmers who came to them for treatment.”

Workers began to be paid everyday and the men would hurry off with their wives to buy whatever they could. They would then hurry to a bank to buy whatever ‘hard’ currency could be had. 

When governments can’t either raise taxes or borrow to pay for their spending, they sometimes turn to the printing press, trying to extract large amounts of revenue from money creation. This leads to inflation.

Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg told about a “night out with friends from Berlin’s foreign colony. He writes that they ended up at a “thoroughly respectable bourgeois apartment.”  They were offered lemonade with a little alcohol in it and..

Then the two daughters of the house entered, in an unclothed state, and began to dance….Read the rest of the story at GramsGold.com
 

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