>>> so long as the owner is bright enough to keep his mouth shut.
The flaw in that reasoning is that the first time you use gold to make a purchase, it becomes known that you do indeed have gold, no matter how tight-lipped you are.
On the devaluation - you are correct, I overstated it.
>>> bartering implies government non-sanctioned transactions
Bartering is basic economics, long preceding ANY monetary systems. Except in the most repressive of regimes, it has never been 'sanctioned or impeded' by governments. I have never heard that implication before, that it needed government sanction. Sounds pretty 'ultra left wing' ta me. *w*
As for farmlands being seized - the huge amount of US farmland was seized several decades ago - and turned over to Corporations. Excessive taxes and inheritance seizures were the primary methods used in that corpo-government takeover. Hiking property taxes is a way that governments have of forcing 'turnovers' to developers. Hell, even the Supreme Court in KELO made it far easier to seize private property because the government decides someone else would 'do a better job' with it - ie. make more money for the government. Point being, that time is already HERE and has been for quite a while.
Basically we differ on a completely different view of what 'hard times' means. To you, it seems that it is only the collapse of the US monetary/economic system. To me, hard times is the collapse of world economies - where NO currency retains it's 'value', such as would occur with wide ranging nuclear war, wide spread electromagnetic pulses (man made or solar), true global pandemics, and other such 'end of the world as we know it' scenarios.
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