We Need More Domestic Oil–So Let’s Face Facts

In the early 1960s the law of supply and demand greatly irked Cuba’s “minister of the economy” Ernesto “Che” Guevara. “No problemo!” he decided one fine morning. I’ll simply abolish it by creating a “new man,” with these insufferable Cubans as my Guinea Pigs.
The world’s intelligentsia applauded deliriously as 14,000 Cubans were murdered by firing squad, 77,000 drowned or were ripped apart by sharks attempting to flee Guevara’s whim, and half a million were herded into political prisons and forced labor camps at bayonet point. (All of this out of a Cuban population of 6.5 million meaning that Castro and Che’s political incarceration rate topped Stalin’s.)
And wouldn’t you know it? After years of this glorious effort, cheered by everyone from Jean Paul Sartre to George Mc Govern and from Norman Mailer to Michael Moore, that doggone law of supply and demand held firm, while Cuba’s per capita income (surpassing half of Europe’s in the 1950s) plummeted to nudge Haiti’s.
For fear of oil spills, as of 2008, the U.S. federal government and various states ban drilling in thousands upon thousands of square miles off the U.S. coast. These areas, primarily on the outer Continental Shelf, hold an estimated 115 billion barrels of oil and 633 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. This leaves America’s energy needs increasingly at the mercy of foreign autocrats, despots, and maniacs. All the while worldwide demand for oil ratchets ever and ever upward.
At times you’d swear that Che Guevara’s bloody lesson (not to mention Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot’s) has yet to sink in. Barack Obama, for instance, recently proposed a “windfall profits” tax on oil companies. Such “hope” that more federal looting of oil producers will lower prices is not “audacious”, it is simply idiotic.
And that’s only part of the idiocy. For those who favor evidence over dogma, a lesson in the “environmental perils” of offshore oil drilling presents itself every bit as starkly, though much less murderously. To wit: Of the roughly 3,700 offshore oil productions platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, roughly 3,200 lie off the Louisiana coast. Yet Louisiana produces one-third of America’s commercial fisheries and no major oil spill has ever soiled its coast.
On the other hand, Florida ,which zealously prohibits offshore oil drilling, had its gorgeous “Emerald Coast” panhandle beaches soiled by an ugly oil spill in 1976.
Read rest here: