How to Survive the Financial Crash

We were both digging our respective allotment plots one afternoon when Nosher suddenly stopped and leant on his spade, looking up at the grey clouds scudding overhead.
'Honey is the roof of all weevils' I thought I heard him say. So I stopped digging too and looked across at him.
'What was that, Nosh?'
'Money is the root of all evil!' he said, a lot louder.
'Is that a religious pronouncement or are you a bit short?'
'It's this financial crash that's coming' he explained 'first Northern Rock and now Bear Stearns in the States. For twenty years the moneylenders in the US and UK have been pushing supposedly cheap money at poorer and poorer people, and now some pretty big chickens are coming home to roost.'
'How does that make money the root of all evil?' I asked.
'Because the the loan salesmen would take big commissions for persuading poor people in rented accommodation to buy their properties with big mortgages on the basis that it would cost them less. It never did, because then they had to spend money maintaining their homes, which they didn't have to do before. And when they got sick or lost their jobs, they lost even the roof over their heads and were poorer than ever. And that's what the financial markets have just woken up to - there's billions of pounds of debt out there that's never going to be repaid.'
'So what's the solution to all this?'
'A moneyless economy' said Nosher emphatically 'bartering and skill-sharing, then you always know where you are'.
'And how did you arrive at this conclusion?' I asked.
'In the Army, doing National Service in the 1950s' Nosher replied. 'I learned three things in the Army: 1. Never volunteer for anything; 2. Keep your head down, and 3. Know who your friends are - your real friends. And that's how I've lived ever since, even more so now I'm retired.'
In the distance we could see a heron flying low along the course of the river.
'So why hasn't it caught on?' I asked.
'Because most young people these days don't have any worthwhile skills to share, and don't know how to barter. They've grown up to be seduced by the idea that money can buy anything, when all it does is feed greed and insecurity. When I was a young lad you had to learn a trade, and you saved up for things. You saved money by learning how to fix your car yourself, making your own furniture, learning useful skills that would serve you well for your whole life. And if you weren't able to do something, you always knew a mate who did, so you could offer to do something for him that he couldn't do and he'd repay the compliment. No money ever changed hands.'
'But if everyone did that the economy would collapse because no taxes would be paid' I objected.
'Sod the beancounters!' exclaimed Nosher with some vehemence. 'They get enough money from taxing everything we buy - and besides, bartering and skill-sharing are not illegal. But we live in an age of big government and they want us all to have enormous mortgages and big debts because that means we're all afraid of losing our jobs so we keep quiet and behave ourselves. And then they squeeze us dry with more and more taxes until we're poorer than we were in the first place. If this carries on more and more people will wake up to the idea that they can live perfectly adequate lives with very little money, simply by bartering and skill-sharing. Look at seed-exchanges - that's an idea that's really beginning to take off.'
'And that was the result of the Common Market seed licensing law of 1973' I remarked 'so not everything that comes out of the EU is bad after all!'
'You're still wet behind the ears!' said Nosher 'the Common Market banned thousands of native English seeds overnight because the big seed producers didn't license them - which was exactly what big business wanted. The pasty-faced bureaucrats in Brussels simply believed all the nonsense they were told by the business lobby. But some people found a way around the law - it's still legal to swap seeds or give them away, and as a result thousands of plant varieties were saved for posterity, despite the best attempts of the cretins in Brussels to destroy our native varieties. So that's what we allotment gardeners do - we swap our seeds or give them away, and say 'bollocks!' to the seed producers who tried to kill them off.'
'So what you're saying is that to survive the financial crash we should all get off our backsides and learn some useful skills and then learn how to skill-share and barter instead of buying everything as part of the money economy' I said.
'That's it exactly' agreed Nosher 'and the sooner it happens the better!'
As we both started digging again I couldn't help feeling that perhaps he had a point after all.
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