Will we forever be over a (Saudi) barrel at the pump?

With crude prices around $40 a barrel and gasoline prices nearly $2 at the pump, the usual know-it-alls are mounting the ramparts.

They are (1) renewing calls for energy independence, (2) demanding release of oil from the salt-domed Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) (with the corollary demand that the Bush administration stop putting more oil into it), and (3) reaching back to the tattered notion of raising the federal gasoline tax by 50 cents a gallon to make gas at the pump higher still.

- U.S. domestic petroleum consumption is up (but as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product it is down).

- Oil imports are up; domestic production is down. In 1970 the U.S. produced 20 percent of the world's crude; today the percentage stands below 10. Yet. . .

I live in Hawaii. The gas companies and the government here have been keeping the gas prices high.

Want to know why?

We have a 50+ cent gas tax. $2.00/gallon gas is cheap gas compared to what we've been paying for years.

The liberals who have had control of our state have created a top heavy bureaucratic government rife with unions and special interests. Spending is out of control and inefficiency is rewarded.

Our Republican Governor is constantly overridden by the legislature, which insists on increasing spending, protecting defunct programs, and resisting reform.

If they can find anything to tax, they tax it. Instead of a sales tax, they instituted an excise tax. Every monetary transaction in this state is taxed. When something is sold by a manufacturer to a warehouse, it is taxed, when that something is sold to a retailer it is taxed, and when it is finally sold to a consumer - it is taxed again.

They are tax happy, and the gax tax here is just another symptom of what happens when liberals make the rules.

The recession from the early 90s lasted till the mid to late 90s in Hawaii. Business unfriendly taxes kept small businesses from expanding. Business unfriendly taxes kept businesses from moving to Hawaii. Business unfriendly taxes drove some of the most promising Hawaii startups to the mainland United States.

It was only after the economy on the mainland had recovered to the point that businesses and individuals began to look at Hawaii as worth the cost of doing business or living here, that things began to turn around. They didn't lower the bar here... The islands just began to look more attractive as other people and businesses had more money to put up with the inefficiency cost of doing business in Hawaii.

So, gas taxes combined with profiteering gas companies, combined with oil speculators have driven the price of oil up, and the price of gas.

And it is beginning to annoy.

We're missing a couple of key technologies for energy independence.

Specifically, we need an electrical storage device that has 100 or 1000 times the energy density of this idiotic ion-exchange battery technology we're now using.

Also, we need room-temperature superconductivity.

Given those two things and a few thousand man-years of engineering effort, and we could tell the rug pilots to "Shove it".

But, then, given that the Chinese are now the ones graduating scientists and engineers while we focus on making sure we have enough immigrant farm workers, it will probably not be us who obtains these technologies first.

Anyone care to guess what will happen next, in that eventuality?

We need to do something about our dependence on foreign oil. This isn't so much a problem of high prices or environmentalism as it is a fact of national security.

Most of the people who live in the nations we buy much of our oil from want to see us cease to exist as a nation and see most of our citizens killed.

This is not a formula for a safe, happy, secure future.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.