Gunner Quinn
Editor’s Introductory Note: This young man is prayerfully seeking a wife. He is offering an after-marriage gift of up to $50,000 to whoever introduces him to his bride with $18,000 after their marriage and another $16,000 to the individual who provided the introduction after the first two births of healthy children born to him and his wife, for a total potential gift of $50,000. For further details, see this link to his article posted on February 24th, 2025: My Quest For a Wife.
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We find ourselves in a unique time which will be of great change. We can either make preparations to survive this time period like any other time or take whatever happens as it happens. Prepared people like to have options, so I am going to present to you a practical and historical case study of previous golden ages. I will bring you on a short historical journey to a few different golden ages along with some more difficult times, analyze the current situation, and provide some very practical ideas. I do hope that this journey will be profitable to you and that you will pass along any wisdom that you find to others. This is a very “future” piece, so please do not take anything I write as advice as this is only speculative. Consider this to be at best a “Gedankenexperiment” — a thought experiment — and I may be very wrong in my conclusions. It would be wonderful to be wrong and for us to be truly entering a golden age. Every day that we do not use our supplies eating from our pantries in peace and using our firearms for sport and recreation is a wonderful day. Please verify everything yourself and pray for the success of our country during this time.
If you suddenly found yourself a great fortune, what would you do? A farmer in Kentucky found a great hoard of gold coins in 2023, after plowing a field. More than 800 gold coins were found by this anonymous man with a face value of 4,000 dollars in 1840-1860s gold coins. Eventually this “hoard” was sold for millions of dollars to collectors around the country. I am sure the farmer is very thankful that he stopped and explored as that one field yielded more in a few hours than it would likely in thousands of years of farming it. There are so many treasures out there that are being discovered as the earth shifts, hurricanes wash treasures ashore, people develop land, or go exploring. One treasure in California ten years earlier in 2013 known as the “Saddle Ridge Hoard” yielded 27,980 gold dollars spread across eight tin cans with a value of over 10 million dollars back then.
Conflict archeologist is the term used for people who study the physical remains of societies in conflicts such as war. We do not know what happened as to why someone would not retrieve treasures such as these, but they were lost for 150 to 160 years. For prepared families, these stories demonstrate several important ideas. Gold has held its value historically. For more than a century that gold lay undisturbed, maintaining its value. The Kentucky field treasure would buy a very nice plantation back in the 1860s, so even this smaller treasure represented a significant amount of wealth being stored against a day of want.
There have been many cases historically of societies that became beneficiaries of great wealth as to how they used their resources. Imagine if our nation instead of being over 36 trillion dollars in debt suddenly discovered a technology selling it to the world for over 60 trillion dollars instantly wiping our debt and leaving us with a 24 trillion dollar surplus. In case you would like a reference point, all of the gold ever mined in the world is worth about 20 trillion dollars even at these historically elevated prices. What would happen? Likely what happened in the past that there would be a great debate and two competing choices. There will be one side that says “spend it all” — distributing it to the people and another that says to reserve it for the future. Let us examine two cases that happened one in the ancient world and another where some readers today are actually today yearly beneficiaries receiving a check because previous generations chose to invest the money for future generations.
In Ancient Greece in 483 BC, a very large vein of silver was found in the silver mines of Laurion. There was a debate on what to do with the money. Unlike our nation, the Athenians had no debt. The local politician who was up for election Aristide — who liked to style himself “Aristide the Just” — wanted to distribute the money to the people. Themistocles, a rival of Aristide, thought that Athens needed to use the money to increase its defenses as the Persians under Xerxes were a threat to their independence. Themistocles was able to persuade their assembly to go with his plan and instead of the silver being distributed to the people was used for construction of ships to counter the Persian threat.
Within two years, Themistocles now an admiral defeated the Persians at the Battle of Salamis because of the 200 ships that were constructed with the costs covered by the recently-discovered silver. Themistocles became a national hero and this ushered in the “Golden Age” in Athens lasting for almost 75 years starting with the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC. This age was symbolized by the leadership of Pericles whose “Golden Age of Pericles” was a golden age within a golden age. Monuments from this period are still standing such as the Parthenon and the Acropolis from this golden age.
Back in the late 1970s, large mineral royalties in the state of Alaska produced a similar debate as had occurred in Athens almost 2500 years earlier. After much debate, they settled on a middle course as Alaska was not an independent state like Ancient Greece requiring its own defense. Alaska chose to save some to pay for state “services” and to establish a “Permanent Fund” of which most full-time Alaska residents residing in the state have received yearly checks since 1982. The checks are an important source of income for many Alaskans and a source of much debate over the future of the program including sustainability of the payments. Several states have resources within them such as various royalties, but no other state has zero income tax. And after 40 years it is still regularly sending checks to its residents.
Our country is not like Alaska which has independent streams of revenue and does not even tax its residents state individual income tax or state sales tax. Our nation is in massive amounts of debt and there are three roads where we may be taken over the next few years and decades. The potential roads are of a golden age, a gilded age, or a grimy age. All three will be explored over the next few days. A golden age is of course what we want as it will usher in peace, security, innovation, and true domestic tranquility as it is the best and what we all want.
I will first define a “gilded age” as so many people reading this may be vaguely familiar with that terms perhaps reading about it years ago. In 1873, the novelist and satirist Samuel Clemens best known by his pen name of Mark Twain wrote a novel “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today” in which he criticized the seedy undercurrents of life in the late 19th century. There was a great deal of progress, but enormous amounts of poverty and misery. Gilding is the process of putting an extremely thin layer of gold over a base metal object. It appears to be valuable if it were made of solid gold, but in reality it has little value.
“All that glistens is not gold” is a line Shakespeare wrote in the “Merchant of Venice” in the scene where Portia has three “caskets” for suitors to choose to win her hand in marriage. In our current language, the aphorism has been updated to “all that glitters.” Portia’s father left her a fortune and was wary of fortune hunters for her so he set up a test. The first prince choose the golden casket and received a skull and the message carrying the warning about glittering objects, the second prince chooses a silver casket and finds a picture of a “fool” with another message of rejection, and the third suitor chooses the lead casket and wins the heart of Portia. Her true love had to borrow money to get to that point of wooing her and his love was sincere. Maybe he was on to something, to choose lead.
Unfortunately, lead will be of use in a grimy age. Grime is not just dirt which is easily washed away, but dirt that is ingrained or driven into the surface of an object. Things that just worked before will no longer work and repairs will be difficult as parts are not available as the supply chain has collapsed. In this grimy age, turn the handle of the faucet and clean water will not come out, it may be dirty or no water may come out. Things that used to work no longer do so and we cannot fix them as the society is in a state of deterioration and collapse. Previous societies such as the Romans attained a level that was not surpassed again for more than 1300 years with running water and sewage disposal which is the minimum building block for cities to grow and have the ability to flourish without the constant threat of communicable diseases. A grimy age is what no one wants because there will be much suffering if supply chains are cut leading to shortages and then starvation.
(To be continued tomorrow, in Part 2.)
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