It's the exponential growth and crash of a deer population after initial plentiful food runs out.
No its not very much like that at all.
Deer don't innovate very much, and don't have sophisticated economies with price signals and substitute goods. Also deer given sufficient food, keep multiplying. The US population would be stable without immigration, and the world's population growth rate keeps going down, quite a few countries already have birth rates below replacement, and others are heading that way.
Don't you think that a substantial portion of our overseas military spending, bases, and wars are to safeguard oil supplies and oil routes?
Is police protection of a commercial district a subsidy to the businesses in that district? No its general keeping of order. Keeping trade open isn't a subsidy.
Also even if we didn't import oil, we would have a large military. If we exported it our navy would protect the exports (at least indirectly, we wouldn't be likely to have to send the oil out in convoys)
There are many interests and allies that we want to be able to protect, or reasons that we want to project power. If you add up the cost that we would need to be able to do each possible operation it would add up to a figure massively higher than our defense expenditures. We have a military large enough, and capable enough to handle most of those contingencies, or even reasonable combinations of them, but remove one and our military needs/desires don't shrink much.
Alan Greenspan, arguably the ultimate insider, in his book says the Iraq war was mostly about oil. Is he wrong? Do you think we would have intervened in Iraq, if it had no oil and was not in the heart of the oil rich Middle East?
Greenspan isn't wrong, but he's right only in an indirect sense. Its not about Iraqi oil, more about Kuwaiti oil, and to an extent Saudi oil. Well in a very indirect sense, if Iraq didn't have oil it would never have been a threat.
If Iraq had managed to be just as much of a threat as it was and it had no oil, than I do think we would have intervened anyway.
OPEC's internal oil subsidies, which we so readily ridicule, pale in comparison to our own hidden oil subsidies.
Our military spending has many other reasons that aren't connected to oil, and even to the extent that concerns about oil may increase the spending, that spending would not be a subsidy.
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