Hate to pop everyone’s bubble but these Mad Max type fantasies will never play out. Societies don’t just collapse into total chaos with every man for himself. Typically there is an out side force that precipitates the collapse of the ruling government and then moves into the vacuum left to take over. There probably won’t even be a short period of time where there is no real governing authority in charge.
Even in hell holes like Somalia there are “governments” controlling most of the population, granted they are mostly tribal in nature but still there is some order and governmental authority being exercised even there. People for the most part don’t like chaos and will gravitate to whatever person stands up at the time (with enough guys with guns backing him) and supports the new regime fairly quickly. Besides, if you really did have a Mad Max type of environment all of you doing the bug out to a survival farm would soon be watching your wife and daughter be raped (if you haven’t been killed already) and your food taken by whatever roving gang spies your hideout and waits until you drop your guard.
So what does that mean in our situation? Who knows! Most likely there will be some rioting and looting in urban areas but with out gas most of the rioters will be stuck in their neighborhoods and will be too lazy/stupid to go more than a few miles outside of there. After that someone will step into the vacuum to take over, restore order rather brutally and then get about the business of taking everything that you stored up in order to feed his goon squad (if he can find it so don’t make it obvious). After that if you haven’t starved to death it becomes a question of rebuilding some kind of economy and restoring functioning services. Urban areas that have some economic reason for being will do well, cities that don’t will die (see Detroit). Rural areas don’t have a lot of economic potential other than farming, mining or some other natural resource exploitation.
So if you want to live on a subsistence level then by all means buy a few acres and go for it. But you’ll be the equivalent of a Mexican peasant and have about the same living standard as one.
Even with a “wealthy” United States providing huge amounts of aid, there are plenty of places in Africal where people starved by the thousands if not hundreds of thousands.
If the American farmer can no longer feed a couple of hundred people besides himself due to fuel shortages, I think we would go down much faster than most think.
What we are facing is unprecedented in history. Our society is completely dependent on our modern distribution system. We have saturated the world with dollars and debt. Places like Somalia have never risen to that level to crash that hard. It will be very tough in first world countries.
Once it crashes, govts will no longer have the funds to maintain order. The best bet is the states, but the national govt will be impotent. It will be fairly anarchic, but way worse in the major city areas. They will leave the ruralies to fend for themselves while they try to contain the cities. The scenario the author projects is very possible.
Thanks. We do appreciate you experts dropping by with your two cents worth.