Store It Foods

Have we stopped learning from the lessons of history?  Sad though that may be, it may be true.  Consider what many historians consider to be the five major causes of the Great Depression that afflicted America throughout the 1930s.

1. The Stock Market Crash of 1929.  Fortunes were lost overnight, and investors stopped investing.  Trust in the stock market simply evaporated.
2. Bank Failures. Throughout the 1930s over 9000 banks failed.  Surviving banks tightened the money supply.  Loans became exceedingly hard to get.  Bankers came to feel that the only way to prevent their own institutions’ failures was to hold onto what they had, and to hold on tightly.
3. Shoppers Stopped Shopping.  Worried over the economy, consumers cut back on consumption.  Purchases were postponed.  Inventories grew.  Stores, unable to sell what they had, stopped placing orders.  Factories facing a lack of orders, stopped producing.  Idle factories laid off workers.  Laid off workers joined the ranks of the unemployed.  Growing unemployment meant even less spending.  It became a vicious circle, one that led to growing suffering and poverty.
4. Buy American.  It seemed like a good idea, but a “Buy American” policy led to high tariffs and retaliatory protectionism from former trading partners who stopped buying American products in order to protect their own markets. Trade wars made the economic situation much worse. 
5. Drought.  Crop failures ruined farmers, and those that weren’t ruined by the lack of moisture found the crops they could produce hard to sell.  Commodity prices dropped in the face of the growing and seemingly unstoppable drop in the standard of living.

Does any of this sound familiar?  Are politicians and other decision makers making the same mistakes as the politicians and decision makers of the 1930s?  Hopefully not, but just in case, it might be wise to prepare, to look very seriously at a good food storage program.