Saxon's Survival Hour #192: How to Become a Disaster Profiteer

Today's excerpt begins on page 132 of The Survivor Volume 1.

Planning to profit from a disaster will give you an edge over those who simply plan to survive it.
Attitude is of primary importance in determining if you will succeed with class and style or will just struggle along with the herd.

The improvident will shrug off the warnings.
The paranoids will fix blame and do little else.
Those with a backpack mentality will run for the hills.
Anxious types will cast around for groups who will take them in on the basis of their goodness or because they have some cash money.
These are losers and if they survive it will be by sheer luck.

But the one with the right attitude toward survival will start now to fit himself with an essential trade.
He will gather the critical commodities, tools, and raw materials needed to establish himself in a position of importance.
The disaster profiteer will prepare, not only to prevail, but to make his mark amid the ruins and to forge his dynasty for ages to come.
That's the kind of thinking which will bring us through the coming storm.

The common image of a disaster profiteer is a person who corners the market on some critical commodity and then charges outrageous prices.
Throughout history, people have taken unfair advantage of their less provident fellows.
However, as bad as the disaster profiteers might have been, their foresight and/or greed often meant the survival of many who would have perished without them.

The breakdown of our society will see the rise of many such profiteers.
But if you prepare to be such a profiteer, no matter how wealthy you become after the disaster, you may still be a person of honor and respectability.

To be a disaster profiteer you must fill an essential need if all you have now is money, you might buy up critical commodities you know will be neither imported nor manufactured for some time after our present civilization ends.

Critical commodities will fall into three basic categories of importance.
First are absolute necessities.
Pharmaceuticals will head this list.
Anti-biotics, anesthetics, narcotics and medicines will mean life or death and will command the highest prices.
Any pharmacist would do well to hoard such absolute necessities while they are still in good supply.

II you are a pharmacist or a physician and have access to bulk pharmaceuticals, you must prepare to be well armed and with a stable group who will help you to defend your supplies.
Your main danger will come from addicts, any one of whom would kill you and destroy your supplies just to get one lousy fix.

Next highest in value comes ammunition and weapons components.
Whole bullets, bullet components, loaders, gun parts, rifle scopes, etc., would insure your security.
A gunsmith would do well to mortgage his home and buy up all the gun-related items he can get.

Just consider: pharmaceuticals, weapon components and just about every other critical commodity you can think of will only rise in price.
You won’t be caught with a supply of goods you can't sell, either to private parties or to an established dealer.
Hoarding is like having money in the bank, its interest growing through inflation.
(This does not include gold, silver, diamonds, etc., unless you are equipped to put them to some industrial use).

Using the examples of pharmaceuticals and weaponry, we come to the difference between the professional disaster profiteer and the amateur.
Say you manage to clean out a pharmacy but know little or nothing about medicine.
Anyone who knows more about medicine would consider you incompetent to manage their useful distribution or trade and would take them from you, even if that meant shooting you.
You might be safer by cleaning out a gun store with its weaponry and spare parts.
But aside from the easily tradable guns, unless you were a gunsmith you couldn't make proper use of the valuable spare parts.

So being a disaster profiteer is not simply amassing a pile of essential goods.
You must be needed just as much for your ability to properly use such materials as much as for their possession.

You should begin now to become a professional concerning any line you want to profit from.
You should also organize, or become a part of, a local survival group.
In this way, your specialty will be appreciated by people who will protect you and your goods.
Anyone trying to rip you off would have to fight the whole group in order to get what you have without paying your price.

The average survivallst will not want to hold the immediate power of life and death over his fellows.
I know I wouldn’t.
Happily, my library of formulas and processes and my knowledge of their use will make me a valued and protected member of any sizable group.
In this way, knowledge alone would ensure me the best that any group had to offer.

So knowledge is the second critical commodity.
Most modern knowledge will be useless when our civilization collapses and our level of applicable technology drops to about what it was a hundred years ago.
Skills of the 19th century will be far more valuable in a few years than will the skills of any surviving nuclear physicist.

THE SURVIVOR should give you many ideas of 19th century technology you could start learning now.
The science of a hundred years ago will be the science of the future.

The third category of critical commodities is simple trade goods anyone can buy and store.
Walk through your local dime store and you will see hundreds of items, seldom considered now, which will be impossible to duplicate for some time after the fall.

Needles, thread, first aid supplies, knives, hatchets, ball-point pens, paper, cosmetics, etc., will be worth more than their weight in gold when they are no longer available.
The investment of a few hundred dollars in such commodities would set you up as a survival group storekeeper.

When considering commodities, don’t be put off by their present abundance.
Your local dime store or supermarket, along with the other stores in your area, will be wrecked after looters go through them.
Most of their contents will be lost through trampling, fire and being picked over by looters.
Your best assurance of having what you need is by buying in wholesale quantities now.

You should see by now, that becoming a disaster profiteer does not require wealth.
Nor does it require that you be grasping and greedy, demanding impoverishment as the price for your goods and services.

You can stay just as good and gentle and sympathetic as you are now.
In fact, your good character and sincerity will keep you safe, even when you must drive a pretty hard bargain.

In future issues of THE SURVIVOR, easily learned survival trades will be outlined.
Any such trade will make you indispensable to your group.
That is the key to being a disaster profiteer.
If you aren’t needed, along with your goods, the temptation will be just too great to shove you aside and take your goods, even if this means killing you.

Kurt Saxon thought civilization would have collapsed by now.
He spent the majority of his life collecting knowledge of home based business.
His goal was for all his readers to survive at a more comfortable level than those that were less provident.

He knew the importance of communicating at a level folks could understand.
Most of what he has compiled for our benefit can be easily understood by everybody.

He also includes a subtle sense of humor.

You can find the majority of his life's work here.

Hear him read his stories.

---

Posts with rewards set to burn only burn the author's portion of the rewards. Curators still get paid.

IF you think this content should be eligible for rewards from the content rewarding pool, please express your discontent in this discord:

https://discord.gg/q3RJXrPk3N