Dave — the problem is two fold:
One, a global marketplace for oil, with rising demand in India and China, along with expanding trans-Pacific, and for that matter trans-Atlantic trade, all of which require Oil. Lots of it, at cheap prices.
Two, long lead-times with lots of opposition in wealthy nations to “messy” energy exploration. We are not going to be drilling, any time soon, in the US because powerful and monied interests find it messy. As bad as a windfarm off ritzy Martha’s Vineyard. Our leaders, the elites, will simply not allow it. Even if they are shoved aside (which politically, they won’t be since they have the money and power — a woman like Nancy Pelosi represents the rich and powerful, she didn’t get where she is by representing working class people), it would take quite a long time to bring new supplies to the market.
Meanwhile the great amount of oil is in these places: the Gulf, Nigeria/West Africa, Indonesia, Russia, Venezuela and Mexico. These are the cards we were dealt.
I agree with Alexis views on market utopia. However, there is one insight where she is both wise and yet missed a point. AQ IS like a bunch of guys playing Dungeons and Dragons forever. That’s the whole point — polygamy limits their ability to form families. Stable, upwardly mobile families do not engage in terrorism. The Market State by creating, even in America, de-facto polygamy, with a few winners (women chasing a few men) and many losers, creates a passive defense.
It’s most NOTICEABLE in the Gulf States, because the effect of polygamy is strongest there, oldest in effect, longer in duration, and has more winners (Sheiks with harems) and more losers (guys like Egyptian-born Mohammed Atta, trained in Germany in Architecture, unable to form a family).
The passive, half-hearted defense of the Western way of life is PRECISELY because so few really have a stake in it. It’s no accident as the Marxists would say that the men who most expect to form their own families — working/middle class white guys from the “conservative” areas of the US, are the point of the spear in the US military.
Does anyone honestly expect men without the ability to form families to fight and die for that society? With massive amounts of single motherhood, the nuclear family passe, and the Sex and the City Lifestyle, of course few will fight for the West (and almost none in Western Europe where things have become immeasurably worse).
We’ve got the perfect storm — third world men (not poor either), ambitious and hungry and angry at being denied families seeking either 72 Virgins or brutal conquest to satisfy their basic sexual-companionship needs, and consumerized Western men substituting video games and porn for a real relationship as they are priced out of the relationship market, unwilling to fight and die for a society that gives them convenience. But not their own family.
