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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (3335)	12/3/2008 8:51:25 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86352

Externalities do not indicate that you don't have a free market. Subsidies are a better case for considering the market to be less free, but the net flow is to government not from them (in fact the US government makes more from oil and refined products than the big US oil companies). The military protecting commerce isn't a subsidy for oil any more than the police force arresting bank robbers is a subsidy for banks. And even if you where to count it as as subsidy for oil, you would have to consider all the other reasons for our military, all the other things it does, and the things it might be called on to do. If we found a new oil field, in the US, that could produce 10 billion barrels a day for the next thousand years, we wouldn't shrink our military. Our military force structure is in no way a cost of oil. Iraq is barely better as an example of your idea. It was about WMD, and other issues. But even if you do (unreasonably) count Iraq, its starting to wind down. It isn't a permanent ongoing cost.