Lindi is right. If oil became more expensive, we would have spent the money on finding a replacement. They do exist. Why doesn’t every home in CA have solar panels?
Trade is important, as each country has unique resources and skills. However, our government leaders have allowed big business and their Fed member banks most likely, to profit at the expense of the American worker and our future productivity.
When we started moving our manufacturing off-shore, there should have been a move to replace auto and textile manufacturing with something else: better farming, pharmaceuticals, engines, alternative energy. Instead, they just went for cheaper goods from overseas. There was no rhyme or reason to it, no planning at all.
Likewise,the entire development of our society with far-flung suburbs and millions of miles of freeways (just a guess) should have been recognized as unsustainable by the urban planners in the 1950’s and 1960s. Did they think that oil is the only resource on this planet that is in unlimited supply? Don’t get me started, I’m getting real pi**ed off at the way our elected officials have let this country go to pot.
Corporations are just as bad. They use corporate bonds and their big profits from the recent liquidity boom to buy back stocks, so the stock price goes up. Then the insiders sell the stock at high prices, in anticipation of the decline which is coming. Not enough money is invested in the future of the company, in building it up. The money goes to elevate the share value for the insiders.
Then we’ve got the bubble in private equity funding. What value is created by that? Just as with free trade where we shift higher paid jobs to lower wage countries and don’t replace those jobs with anything at all, what good comes of it?
If we really want to help the poor countries, we should teach them how to farm and manufacture. Maybe I’m just rambling…
