By Joel Skousen

This week, I’m going to diverge from my normal preparedness tips and switch to my geopolitical expertise as the editor of the World Affairs Brief (www.worldaffairsbrief.com) .  I feel the need to address the root controversy about what we are preparing for. I field more questions from subscribers and preppers each week on the subject of economic collapsethan any other topic, and despite the failure of all these collapse predictions since 2010, they are back again in 2015.

And, it’s no wonder. There is an unending flow of predictions of complete and imminent collapse coming from both the uninformed and some very bright financial newsletter writers on the conservative/libertarian side such as Jim Rickards, Peter Schiff, Michael Snyder, R.G. Allen, Robert Kiyosaki, John Williams (shadowstats.com), Mike Maloney, and Mike Dillard (who’s been pushing the collapse of the EURO for years now and still won’t stop despite the failure of his predictions).

I’m not going to tell you that things are fine.  They are not. The financial collapse writers are well informed about the problems of excessive debt, fiat money, and deficit spending that politically cannot be stopped nor solved now that the benefit corrupted voters can out-vote those of us who want government to stop these suicidal redistribution schemes.

But they have not thought out clearly the specifics of how and why it’s so difficult for an actual collapse to occur.  Historically, no nation has ever collapsed financially outside of the destruction of war—none (even the so-called “collapse of the Soviet Union” was a carefully crafted deception, as outlined in this piece).  Only when people are thrust into the most abject circumstances of survival, such as in WWII in Europe with the combination of allied bombing and the Russian invasion does an economy cease to function and turn into a mob of pillaging people.

Let me cover the various collapse scenarios that are being hyped constantly and why they aren’t necessarily imminent:

Electric Grid collapse: It is true that the nation would descend into massive social unrest should the electric grid go down and stay down for more than two weeks.  That said, there are a lot of uninformed predictions about a massive solar flare, or EMP strike by some terrorist or rogue nation that could cause a grid collapse.  The solar flare scenario is really only a threat to the grid in high northern latitudes since charged particles are channeled by the earth’s magnetic field toward the North Pole.  Canada is much more at risk from a massive solar flare.

And, contrary to a lot of arm-chair tacticians, a single nuclear EMP strike over the US by some terrorist group is not capable of taking down the entire grid.  It takes at least six simultaneous high altitude nuclear bursts to blanket the US, and only Russia and (to continue http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/the-case-against-imminent-economic-collapse-they-can-keep-bailing-things-out-for-several-more-years-without-fear-of-collapse_02162015.)