>I'm not sure if I agree with that. Money saved will be inflated away
Some property can't really be inflated away, although disposing of it for a fair value after an inflationary collapse could be difficult. Nobody is printing more land, but property taxes can be raised to infinity.
>I'm not sure where you get the 'order restored within a decade' from but if you are pulling from historical examples then I think you should be careful with survivorship bias.
I'm talking about the average war, natural disaster, or inflationary event that you could see in your lifetime, especially if you live in the US. Nobody knows the future but if you're worried about things that affect the economy then I think it's unlikely to stay down forever if it collapses.
>I can think of a number of examples where empires fell only to be replaced by their adversaries, so let's say the US does collapse, would order being restored be in the form of China taking over? In that situation it would be hard for me to imagine that working out well for the average American.
Have you ever heard of trying to control the things you can and to live with the things you can't? What do you think the odds of having ordinary economic hardships versus China invading any nuclear-armed country, much less the US? I think it could be argued that saving valuable resources would help in any situation, as long as it isn't 100% in worthless paper. There are far more people who lived large and ended up impoverished in old age, than any war casualties in all the wars ever fought. Even Germany, which was severely beaten down by two massive wars, managed to recover from all of that in the span of one lifetime.
Ideally, you would invest your money and get a return. But in my lifetime, the stock market has crashed multiple times. If you were all in on that, especially as you near retirement, you could lose too much money.