Reports from around country today indicate that in some areas gasoline has hit six dollars a gallon. The Obama Administration has done very little to address the systemic problem associated with domestic gasoline production but apparently has embraced Obama's own words from 2007, "Under my plan energy costs will necessarily skyrocket."
Obama had a chance to reverse such an unfortunate course of action by approving the Canadian oil pipeline this year. But he nixed it.
The problem, however, with domestic oil production is complicated and is indicative of how modern industrialized nations have become so economically intertwined that it is difficult to unravel it all to get to the heart of the issue.
Much of America's domestically produced oil is sold overseas. In turn, the U.S. purchases most of the oil we use from foreign countries. And that brings us to the notion of 'mutually assured economic destruction.'
At the height of the Cold War in the early to mid 1970s, a concept was introduced at the highest levels of government that became known as 'Mutually Assured Economic Destruction.' The idea was based upon the accepted deterrent to nuclear war at the time known as 'Mutually Assured Destruction.'
Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter had all bought into the notion that the best America could hope for in the face of the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union was a stand off, which was referred to as 'detente.'
The underlying intellectual foundation of detente was the knowledge that if either side attacked the other with a nuclear missile, the retaliatory consequence would be all out nuclear war which would result in the total destruction of both countries if not the entire world.
This, it was believed at the time, was an adequate deterrent to either side using the nuclear bomb.
It took Ronald Reagan to show the nation and the world just how precarious if not outright asinine such a notion was. He took it upon himself to gain for the U.S. nuclear superiority--and won.
But behind the scenes the lesser minds who seemed to be fixated on the mutually assured destruction madness turned their attention to economics. Instead of making nuclear bombs the focus of their boneheaded scheme they postulated a theory, which of course was accepted, that the industrialized nations of the world should operate under the concept of 'mutually assured economic destruction.'
The mechanism for implementing this scenario was quite simple: insure that the economies of all of the industrialized nations on earth were so closely intertwined that if one collapsed, they all would collapse. This would supposedly prevent a nation from implementing policies that would target and weaken a competitor's economy.
If, for example, you shut out a competitor, say, from the corn market, which of course would lead to untold economic peril for that nation, then its collapse would inevitably lead to your own collapse due to your dependence on that nation's salt, for example. And that, in turn, would lead to the collapse of all of the industrialized nations given that even the slightest glitch in the economic stability of one nation would immediately impact all of the rest.
But, as Reagan saw with nuclear Mutually Assured Destruction, the success of such a harebrained scheme was dependent on everyone being honest. The Soviet Union used detente to their benefit through dishonest means. So it has been true with Mutually Assured Economic Destruction. Many of the nations involved in the pact do not play fair. Such is the case with China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, and any number of nations with whom we trade.
When the U.S. government mandates that most of the oil produced by American companies must be sold overseas, then the impetus for increasing domestic oil production is automatically negated. The objective is supposedly to end our dependence on foreign oil.
However, a maze of various laws and regulations currently prevents that from happening no matter how much the U.S. increases its own oil production. The reason? Trade agreements with nations with whom we have entered the pact called Mutually Assured Economic Destruction.
The way the game is played insures that we continue to sell most of our oil to foreign nations while buying most of the oil we use from overseas. This scheme fosters a dangerous economic codependency that prevents the U.S. from carrying out its Constitutional mandate to protect its own citizens and interests from all enemies both foreign and domestic.
And while China, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Dubai, Russia, and other nations benefit greatly from the mutually assured destruction pact, the U.S. languishes under a burden of restrictive regulation and energy costs that threaten to intensify the level of economic collapse that edges ever closer by the day.
Be sure to catch my blog at The Liberty Sphere.
Comments