On Friday 11 April 2008 01:40:05 pm Damon L. Chesser wrote:
> The fact that China is sucking up all the oil they can buy on the free
> market has nothing to do with $100/barrel, does it?
You are confusing correlation with causation. China's been industrializing
for the last 20 years now. Oil has been reasonably stable in price over that
period except for the last 7 years. Iraq is one of the major oil producing
nations, and we attacked them about 7 years ago and only now is oil
production there even beginning to climb back towards pre-war levels.
Certainly, China's use is a factor in this, but nowhere to the degree that
the US leading the world in oil consumption and Iraq prior to the war being
something like the second most productive oil producing nation.
> Perhaps if we passed a law stating you can not sell oil for more then
> $50/barrel, everything would be good?
That just violates basic economic principals, setting the price below the
balance of supply and demand, especially given we're talking about an
international commodities market and thus don't have the aboslute authority
to make such a move possible. It can and ought to be solved by taxing the
everlasting crap out of excess profits, though: Petroleum companies have
been posting profits increasing at a rate nearly twice that of the price of
oil. There is precident for taxing excessive profit in the US during World
War II, and the economy was better off for it. Then again, another thing
that was different about WWII, back then it was a felony to make a profit off
the war.
> At some point in time you will know Ron is right
Ron's right when he sticks to Debian, and very rarely any other time from my
experience reading this list.
> and Peace and Love WILL break out (just like it did when The Wall came down
> and our military was no longer needed in the ensuing lack of war and
> destruction)
Comments like that make me wonder if neoconservatives remember history, or if
they're trying to doom us all to repeat it.
You wrongly assume that we did anything like the Marshall Plan at the end of
the Iraq War proper. The current administration deemed anything resembling
the Marshall Plan for Iraq to be "Cut and Run." Instead, we ship contractors
in from outside Iraq to handle everything rather than hire the locals,
leading to 75% unemployment and an utter collapse of the middle class as
roughly 40% of it fled the country, and massive cost overruns for us. If
Truman had decided to continue occupying Germany indefinitely and sent
Americans in to rebuild Germany instead of going with the Marshall Plan, it's
very likely Berlin and Hamburg by 1953 would be a lot like Baghdad and Basra
are today and every major city within a week's drive outside Germany would
have a German enclave.
As for all hell not breaking loose post USSR, that's probably having more to
do with the concept that the Soviets didn't have a cultural need to go
eye-for-an-eye, which is why the Afghans and bin Laden when he was on the US
payroll handed the Soviets their own asses in the 80s. It's too bad we
didn't learn our lesson about what happens when you pay terrible people to do
your bidding: We're repeating it now by paying what's left of the opposition
not to shoot at us in Iraq.
--
Paul Johnson
baloo@ursine.ca
