How does Al Quaeda pay for its weapons? How does Iraq pay for its weapons? How does Libya pay for its weapons? What has and will it cost us to defend ourselves against enemies we finance with petrodollars? Wasn't there an alternative?
Instead we let the RICOnuts place legal restrictions on the competitors to foreign oil. Who sponsored those restrictions? Who fed the environmental hysteria? Who is the biggest collective sponsor of environmental groups? Who founded the Environmental Grantmakers Association? Who are the biggest sponsors of the UN? Along with international banking investors, the charitable foundations of major oil industry stockholders: Rockefeller, Pew, Prince Berhnard, Phillips, the British Royal Family... oil.
Were the alternatives viable? Coal? Natural gas? Nuclear? Trip reduction through broadband? If one added the cost of supporting the military infrastructure to maintain our industrial expansion and acquisition of raw materials abroad to the price of the products we import, I doubt very much that all that foreign entanglement would look like a good deal because of the risk of nationalization and war. If you add the risk to our liberty, the safety of our families and children, the threat of our own government, and the internal regulatory cost driven by UN treaties, I doubt very much that it would look like a good deal.
The pattern is repeating in other resource markets where we have plentiful resources and end up importing because of environmental restrictions. We import timber to the Pacific Northwest, minerals from China that are available just above Los Angeles, and now even food. If we don't learn our lesson very soon about the price of liberty and the cost of risk, we will lose the first and pay for the second anyway.
Why don't you fire that off to IBD? ibdletters@investors.com
They actually published one of my letters last year, and you're a much better writer than I am.