I drove in to work later than usual today and caught a bit of Glenn Beck. Like many conservative talk radio hosts I have heard he was promoting the value of gold as an investment. What caught my attention was the way he started out. I’m going to paraphrase here but essentially he started out by saying:
I don’t know what the future holds for this nation, nobody does. I don’t know what you should be investing in right now.
My immediate reaction was to say to myself that I know exactly what the vast majority of people should be investing in right now – they should each invest in themselves. To his credit Glenn said that gold was not the right investment for everyone and suggested that before investing in gold people should invest in food storage, paying down debt, and having some cash reserves. I think that’s a great start but investing in yourself is more than that.
Surely when I say that most people would immediately assume that I am thinking of increasing your education as an investment in yourself. Of course getting an education is an investment in yourself, but what I had in mind was personal independence, investing in yourself to make yourself less dependent on our economic system and institutions. In other words I talking about making the investment of time and energy to produce your own food and other necessities as much as you are able. Food storage is good, but if you don’t know how to cook it you’ll get less out of it when you need it most. Knowing how to use your storage is good, but storing a lifetime of food is impossible unless you have the means to produce food supplies from what you have in storage. Some may suggest that storing a lifetime of food is ridiculous and unnecessary but I would ask – how much is enough? If two years is enough, how can you be sure that your need will not exceed two years?
You might wonder why I would write this on a politically oriented site. The answer is that an understanding of independence is fundamental to the ability to make informed choices about preserving independence. We as a nation are dependent on other nations to buy our debt and produce far too many of our goods. Too many of us are so dependent on others for all that we consume that we cannot even conceive of taking care of ourselves in an extended period of trouble (and by extended I am thinking in terms of weeks). Of course there are circumstances where we cannot be truly independent, a person who needs dialysis is going to be dependent on some source of electricity over any extended period of time, but the majority of people should consider how dependent they are on others and make some decisions about what they can and should do to be more self-reliant. The fact is that if a person is truly independent they can afford to be wrong in their more traditional investments and they can also pass up more risky investments for the more dependable ones.
I’ve been thinking about this topic for a long time and can’t really contain my thoughts, but I think I’ll revisit the topic of personal independence and explore what it means.
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