Without significant political changes, none of which appear likely, the United States is going to collapse. When and how it happens is hard to say, but the U.S. government’s spending is fiscally unsustainable, as the Government Accountability Office has been warning since 1992. As one such report said, that which is unsustainable will not be sustained.

The GAO’s warning this month took on a new sense of urgency, and the recent passage of a health care reform bill expected to cost Americans trillions of dollars while destroying the quality and availability of health care, along with this week’s news that Social Security has gone into the red years earlier than expected, makes the government fiscal situation — not to mention that of ordinary Americans — even more dire.

The questions then become, who will survive the collapse, and how?

Tom Baugh, author of Starving the Monkeys: Fight Back Smarter, spoke March 19 at the New Hampshire Liberty Forum.

“The first step,” Baugh said in his presentation, “is to understand what the problems are.” Baugh says we need to be able to identify the enemies of liberty, which he calls monkeys in his book, understand how to defeat them, and then get on with the work of rebuilding civilization. These are the challenges which lie directly ahead for people who believe in liberty, who add value and “quality of life.”

Simply hiding out in a hypothetical Galt’s Gulch will not work, he says, because: “There is nowhere on earth that we [can] go that they will not hunt us down, bomb us, burn us, or haul us away.”

(There was a PowerPoint deck which I wanted to incorporate into the video, which is why the camera is framed the way it is, but I haven’t received a copy. If I do, I’ll update the video.)

The New Hampshire Liberty Forum is an annual conference held by the Free State Project, a movement to bring 20,000 activists to New Hampshire to work toward reducing the size, scope and power of government and increasing individual liberty and responsibility. The project has signed over 10,000 participants, and over 800 have already moved. The Liberty Forum, and the project’s summer camping event, PorcFest, allow people undecided about the project to see the state firsthand and observe and participate in local activism.