by JohnDenver » Tue 23 Jun 2009, 10:30:38
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('kpeavey', 'S')ome systems and organizations would continue to get all the fuel needed
1 Military
2 Federal government
3 State government: National Guard, Troopers
4 County: Sherrif, Emergency Services
5 Municipal: Police, Fire, Rescue
6 Critical Industrial Systems, electricity, key resource processing
7 Agriculture
8 Transportation in support of the above systems
Whatever is left would be rationed.
Good points rangerone and kpeavey.
So far the thread seems to have established:
1) Opinions are basically unanimous that oil will be rationed.
2) Important functions will be prioritized.
The idea that rationing per se will cause economic collapse seems far-fetched. After all, rationing was adopted by the US and many other countries during WW2, and it didn't cause economic collapse or mass unemployment. In fact, the US economy was incredibly productive during that time. Furthermore, everything was rationed in the USSR for almost 70 years, and their economy functioned fairly well for most of that time. Granted it wasn't booming, but it wasn't Mad Max either. Rationing certainly didn't cause any immediate collapse of society or mass unemployment.
So I think we're right back at the original question: What is a credible scenario for total economic/social collapse in the context of rationing?
It seems very odd that so little attention is given to rationing, considering that the forum thinks it is inevitable. We hear collapse scenarios every day here, but for some reason they never mention rationing and how that figures into the collapse.
Consider a country like North Vietnam during the Vietnam war. They had rationing in place, but their government and economy didn't collapse. In fact, they were carpet bombed for years, and their state still ran like a clock.The lesson I draw is that governments can be extremely tenacious, even under extreme resource constraints.
Orlov likes to point to the "collapse" of the USSR, but there was no collapse in the peak oil sense of the word. The country had a functioning government the whole time, and Putin's Russia is hardly an example of a zombie country where industrial society has collapsed and you need a doomstead to survive. Here too, the point is that political/economic power is extremely tenacious and does not collapse easily.