Each person received the same exact coupons for four pounds of meat, two pound of sugar, two pounds of flour, and one gallon of vodka per month. Raw milk, when left alone for two minutes, gathers kind of fur coat on top of it. We wandered around, with wizened frondescence beneath our feet, sinking softly into the dark, green, moist moss, with our eyes firmly fixed on the ground, bantering casually with each other over who found what and how much. Then, if you beat it for long enough, it will turn into butter. Before I could perform my assigned duty, however, the caught fish had to be measured. The Slavic soul, eternally torn by existential anxieties of meta-proportions, is naturally prone to alcoholism, and our town, no different from any other Polish town, was always full of drunk philosophers and poets. How many mushrooms? In other words, to be able to effectively manage your bribery ring, you need to get to know all of your shopgirls and their current needs. The lawyers and the entire legal system serve the government. You had to line up to your drunkard right after you received your monthly coupons, because if you were just a few minutes late, someone else was sure to snag your drunk’s coupons in front of your nose. Change your passwords frequently, and don't respond to spamming … Discuss scenarios with adult members of your family that could cause you to need to defend yourselves and a basic plan. In socialism, you really have nothing and no one to depend on except yourself. Socialism violates private property. Click here to get your free copy today. The fish diet apparently worked as all three of them have grown to be six foot tall. Generally, physical assets such as precious metals are safer than paper assets. As a child, I got to live in Nica for about three years. They hung out in front of the liquor stores, in parks, and in bus stations, delighting themselves with Polish vodka, ethanol, and cheap aftershave, casually quoting Mayakovski and Pushkin in a drunken daze. The Socialist elite think they have you and I by the balls, and can control us. . So, did those organic strawberries taste like what you remember? The impact of malinvestments is deflationary; credit is destroyed, asset prices fall, investors become more hesitant and reluctant, and the appeal of sitting tight in cash grows. There is no constitution, and if there is one, it serves the government. Our conversations ranged from Kant’s philosophy to the construction of a kinescope and the universe. Under socialism, the countryside has more streamlined access to food, so one of your family members has to move there, regardless of how much of an urbanite he or she claims to be. When I came to the U.S. Since I was too young to participate in these pleasures of adult life, unfortunately, I missed that part. Even in our current times, when currencies become unstable, individuals begin to price their assets in other currencies or precious metals like gold --. To kill time—the only killing he was ever able to do—we talked. How do I protect my wealth? Depending on the circumstances you grew up in, you develop different food habits. My grandmother’s garden was bulldozed years ago to make room for a new socialist bungalow, and it’s been over twenty years since I’ve eaten rose jam. My father had infinite patience, untangling my carelessly thrown line from the nearby bushes, putting the tiny soggy oatmeal grains on my hooks, and staring for hours at our two motionless floats. Pingback: How I Survived Socialism: A Self-help Guide For Worried Americans – Magda Romanska, Pingback: Between Art and Science: A Conversation with Roald Hoffmann, Nobel Prize-winner, scientist, playwright and poet – Magda Romanska, Pingback: How I Survived Socialism: A Self-Help Guide for Worried Americans – Snapzu Lifestyle, Pingback: How I Survived Socialism: A Self-Help Guide for Worried Americans – Snapzu Politics, Pingback: How I Survived Socialism: A Self-Help Guide for Worried Americans – Snapzu Places. I’m writing this right after meeting Magda in person in Boston after being in virtual contact for years; this piece has always been one of my CR favs. Generally, the trend is to increase democratization, alleviate the damages done by capitalism, reduce unjustified hierarchy, and … Somehow, I have never ventured into this area of Polish cuisine, so the taste of those delicacies will forever remain foreign to my taste buds, but there are those who swear by a piece of cow’s tongue in cream sauce, or pig’s brain fried with salt and butter. This was a forest I could get lost in and never find my way back home from. The main and the most important task while unstable economic situation is … Socialism, social and economic doctrine that calls for public rather than private ownership or control of property and natural resources. Fear no more: there are some unbeatable, proven, and tested strategies that can help you organize all the food you need. . Bread lines would take sometimes as little as 24 hours, but the lines for toilet paper or sugar could take three days to a week, sometimes even longer. How to protect yourself from economic collapse? The one and only way to stop Socialism is to restrict or abolish government bureaucracy, including and especially the education bureaucracy. Some dishonest or desperate fishermen would take home every fish they caught regardless of its size, but not my compulsively correct father. Yes, because if you succeed at getting a tip from your shopgirl about the next delivery of the desired good, you must now prepare to stand in line. I enjoyed reading this Magda. For twenty bucks, you can feed a four-person family for a week. It took me thirteen years before I could afford the same kind of food I ate as a child. Throughout history, gold and silver have been the most popular choice free marketeconomies around the world has chosen as money. As the night was slowly setting in, my mother sat there motionless, vacantly starring at the crepuscular horizon. The fur was used to make hats, gloves, and vests. . . My other grandmother had a drug store adjacent to her home. -- there is also the issue that centrally planned economies simply may not be capable of making the infinite number of decisions required to produce. . 3. Create business entities to shield assets. Here are 10 reasons a Bank On Yourself plan is the best place to warehouse your money: There was always the possibility that the Soviets would invade, and that with each new governmental concession to the people, eventually, a price would have to be paid. . It seemed incomprehensible that in this richest country in the world, most of its citizens grew up never knowing the taste of real food. Without chewing gum and M&M’s, without Lunchables and Gerber baby foods, without Snickers Bars, Power Bars, and breakfast bars. I never again saw such feeling of valiant pride on my father’s face as on that cold winter night of 1981 when organizing a wreath of toilet paper was as miraculous as Christmas and Hanukkah combined. She put it up in the bathroom, shut the door, and ordered my father to go kill it. That’s the beauty of socialism. Once in a blue moon, my father bought a bottle of Pepsi or a tablet of Swiss chocolate from Pewex, a chain of stores that catered to foreign tourists. . Yes, the socialist government, more so than a capitalist one, encourages self-reliance. My mother did have a doctor friend but she didn’t need to fabricate anything because, luckily, I had a bone disorder so rare and obscure that no one on the government meat panel was able to verify whether, indeed, I justly qualified for an additional portion of meat coupons. Your share had to be neatly divided into sub-plots, rotated yearly to ensure the greatest variety and most abundant harvest. To get your very own share, you had to file an application and wait two to five years. . My mother used to manage her own compost, too, but as I remember it, it never smelled, and I never saw one rat frolicking on it in joyful abandon, as they often did on our Stanford compost. To stand in line, you need to bring a sleeping bag, pillow, and thermos with hot drink of your choice. But my father had a profound dislike of our share, though I don’t know whether it was because he simply wasn’t the gardening type, or because our shack didn’t have TV. Yes, maybe he wasn’t the fearless fish-killer she dreamed of him to be, but hell, he organized 12 rolls of toilet paper and that must have counted for something! Communism stemmed out of Marxism. Strawberries tasted like paper, bread tasted like cotton balls, milk tasted like bleach, and ice cream tasted like tissues soaked in sugar. My mother, unfortunately, had no ambitions to own her own business, so I missed out on the adventures of being a rent-a-child, but I did have an opportunity to participate in some momentous line events, like, for example, the 1982 four-day line for pork chops. Gold and silver will be the only money to survive, just as it has for 5,000 years. Specifically, we'll discuss how to preserve wealth in a socialist economy, like an increasing number of the economies in the world today. If she’s pregnant, she’ll need plastic bottles and terrycloth diapers for her baby. Once she was done, my mother took off her jeans and her flannel shirt. If so, can we store our wealth in that respective currency? In the city, my great grandmother owned an taxi service. Every month, at the same time, my mother, graceful as a gazelle, marathoned her way through the bread lines to meet my father at his office to pick up his vodka coupons, and then she’d marathon back to town to meet Mr. Józio and his friends at the usual spot in front of their beloved liquor store to exchange our vodka coupons for their meat coupons. ... we have an entire team of analysts that we are sending all around the world to find solutions that’ll help you protect yourself and your family from all these risks. Every year, all three of my cousins and I got sick from overeating freshly picked cherries and raspberries. The bill came due on 13 December 1981 when martial law was declared by General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who had come to power a month earlier. The sun shined through the sparse leaves, and my husband was testing the zoom of our new Nikon on one lonesome butterfly, when suddenly I realized that I had never felt more a stranger in America than I felt right here in this strange forest, which I didn’t know. Socialism is the road to communism, a transitionary state. Hayek elaborated on this issue in his classic book, The_Road_to_Serfdom. Once in a while, usually for their anniversary, my parents enjoyed some of these perks of socialist living as all the countries in the socialist bloc would customarily exchange their luxury goods at nominal mark-ups. Thank you Magda for sharing your story. you insulate & protect yourself? To supplement your family’s diet with all-important proteins and antioxidants, you can choose to hunt, fish, or gather. But then, in the middle of my meal, the impulse came to stop eating, to leave it for later, just in case. My mother pickled the mushrooms, dried them, fried them, and rolled them in dumplings. My grandmother smoked the sausages above her oven, and we fried it on long wooden sticks over the bonfires that we made every summer and fall in the backyard of my grandmother’s house . We discovered this when one day I was sent as a spy to go fishing with him. A flu vaccine this season can also help reduce the burden on our healthcare systems responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and save … This guide is based on the decade between 1980 and 1990, roughly the time between martial law and the Round Table Talks, right before perestroika took hold of the Eastern Bloc and before the Berlin Wall melted down in the warm sun of glasnost. I realize, no matter where we live, we all have the same needs and enjoy the fruits that life has to offer. . . Many people talk about the destruction of privacy from Bush’s Patriot Act, while others discuss the nationalization of the healthcare system from Obamacare. She used the berries for pierogi and a thick wild berry syrup that we drank when we were sick. I was amazed by the sheer size of American lawns. Once the fish was deemed large enough to end up in my mother’s pan, I did the honors of getting it across the fish Styx. . Once this was done, she smoked another cigarette, took the shovel, and flipped the manure over so that it was now covered with soil. If she’s getting married, she will need white shoes. She put her office clothes, her wedding band, and her high heels back on, fixed her hair and her makeup, and washed her hands in the nearby river. Pingback: Socialism and surviving | Mitch Bensel Author. What robust community-building took place in these ludic lines, with people chatting up their neighbors, and finding lifelong friends, lovers, and spouses. My parents’ friends’ in-laws had an apple orchard, so every fall we got a couple of boxes of apples from them. I looked at it with a mixture of cultural wonder, sadness, and confusion. The insides and intestines became sausage, and the bones became the basis for various soups and sauces. During that fateful decade of the food coupons, however, they suddenly became revered. This was a very profitable venture for some entrepreneurial mothers. It is so very wrong to argue that socialism is a nanny state. 6. Once my mother made the gruesome discovery, she put me in charge of killing the fish that my father had caught before he could release it. You can imagine my absolute shock when I arrived in the U.S. and realized that money does have a purpose, and that, yes, there are goods you can actually simply purchase without coupons or bribing anyone. . Good question, but in reality there are only few things to do. So rather than trying to time the coming secular economic downturn, it is more important to plan how to protect yourself. Wilson wanted to scrap the whole document and write a new one that would shield the government from the people. In this post we'll talk about the top priority of every trader and investor: wealth preservation. The Bank On Yourself method relies on a super-charged variation of an asset that’s never had a losing year in more than 160 years: Dividend-paying whole life insurance. 10 Reasons a Bank On Yourself Plan is the BEST Place to Store Your Money. Anemia or various muscle and bone disorders are always a good idea. Last fall, my husband and I took a stroll in the local forest here in New England. Run some drills with multiple targets. Another irony of socialist life was that though our socialist government was not able to maintain regular delivery of bread or toilet paper to its stores, it had ambitions to produce and deliver luxury goods. You could only shop there with dollars, which meant that only foreigners could shop there, as it was illegal for any Pole to own dollars. Both families cultivated the land to grow a vegetable, fruits and Raise animals to slaughter for survival. Deficits. It was a time of political unrest, a time of so-called shortages, and the time of my gloriously innocent childhood. I couldn’t quite understand these efforts. Many years later while at Stanford, I ended up living in a progressive student house. The fact that owning dollars was illegal didn’t stop anyone from buying them on the black market to shop in Pewex for birthday sweets and coffee. Like Proust’s madeleine, the unforgettable simple, everyday pleasure one derived out of the green jealousy of one’s lesser friends who couldn’t get anything from under the counter would often sustain you on many lonesome line standing nights. If you are lucky and have a friend who is a doctor, he or she might be willing to help you choose a disease that requires an additional consumption of protein. may he rest in peace. To understand how wealth preservation differs in socialism rather than capitalism, we first need to understand the economic and productive differences between the two types of economies. Socialism is increasing, the market is getting risky, pensions are broke and governments around the world are drowning in debt. When an American Dream Turns into an American Tragedy…, How I Survived Socialism: A Self-Help Guide for Worried…, The Polish-Arabian Horse: A Very Brief History, Second Homeland: Polish Refugees in India, Hacienda Santa Rosa: a Polish Refuge in Mexico, The Ethnic and Religious Diversity of the Polish Lithuanian…, Elegant Prewar Poland, Evoked by New Fonts from Graphic…, When Rhinos Roamed the Polish Prairie: The Exotic Homeland…, Pola Negri: Hollywood’s First Femme Fatale, How I Survived Socialism: A Self-Help Guide for Worried Americans, Between Art and Science: A Conversation with Roald Hoffman, How I Survived Socialism: A Self-help Guide For Worried Americans – Magda Romanska, Between Art and Science: A Conversation with Roald Hoffmann, Nobel Prize-winner, scientist, playwright and poet – Magda Romanska, How I Survived Socialism: A Self-Help Guide for Worried Americans – Snapzu Lifestyle, How I Survived Socialism: A Self-Help Guide for Worried Americans – Snapzu Politics, How I Survived Socialism: A Self-Help Guide for Worried Americans – Snapzu Places, Socialism and surviving | Mitch Bensel Author. 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