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Oil Prices Will Go Up, and the Economy Will Go Down, As a Result of Revolution in the Middle East

By Joseph McDaniel, Esq.

I am not the same guy I was in college, and except for the biceps, I think that's a good thing.

In college, my beard and long hair would have gone well with my Che Guevara T-Shirt, except that I couldn't afford a Che Guevara T-Shirt. And I thought a Glorious People's Revolution would have been cool, because the People's Dictator would certainly have given me the Che Guevara T-Shirt I so deserved!

There's nothing like working in the private sector (and I've also worked for years for the government, as a bankruptcy law clerk for Bankruptcy Judges and bailiff for Superior Court Judges) and reading history to make you suspect that most revolutions are just one guy grabbing a government from another guy, the American Revolution excepted (read history; you'll be amazed!).

And don't read stuff about the American Revolution; read the stuff written by the founders themselves, and it will, you know, blow your mind! 

So I don't much agree that revolution in the Middle East will result in a Glorious State of Democracy, and I don't agree that the United States is a bad do-bee that props up tin-pot dictators (except when that seems like a good idea), but I do agree with folks who are all over the political spectrum on this one issue: oil prices are going up.

I don't know how or why oil prices are going up, because I'm not that smart, but I do know that oil prices are going up. A lot. And they will go up steadily. Forever.

There are some countries that have had short discussions in their governments on Tuesday and then fixed their national energy policy on Wednesday. It's not like it takes a lot of thought.

Japan is one such country; it has about three hundred nuclear power plants, and those produce extremely cheap and safe energy for Japan. The reason there are three hundred plants instead of one hundred is simple; we bombed Japan back to the Stone Age during World War II, and they knew what not having energy was like.

They didn't like it much.

When the cost of oil goes up, so does the cost of everything, because it costs more to deliver all products, and it costs more to drive to work.

That will drive up the cost of all goods sold, and everything that people buy will become more expensive.

Fortunately, everything that people buy now is produced in China, and China has solved it's energy problems the easy way; it drills for oil off the coast of the United States.

And burns that oil and the gas from it in China. Now, my scientist friends tell me that oil and gas burning in China produce zero emissions, which means that letting China produce everything made in the United States is a great idea!

On the other hand, one side-effect of oil burning in China is that jobs are burning in the United States.

Summary: things will get worse for a long time in the United States Economy. That will happen until we re-build an economy which has an overwhelming manufacturing advantage over our global competitors.

Which means, unless we develop some source of cost-effective energy production today, we will have zero jobs tomorrow.

Conclusion: if you ever plan to retire, you probably ought to consider filing bankruptcy so that you are debt-free, and will be able to buy copious supplies of cat-food, which has substantial protein.

And you might also want to consider buying some Vitamin C, D, and a Multi with adquate Selenium.

To go with your cat food; it's a good source of protein, not so much of Vitamin C.

p.s. I love the circularity of the concept; we atomic bombed the heck out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the easiest possible way to fix the energy deficit in the United States is to hire Hiroshi Morimoto to ship us designs (or prefab, I'm not picky) for nuclear power plants.

Japan might be so amused they it would do so for free. Here, we'll help you out! And can you imagine the number of actual jobs that would be produced if we permitted nuclear power plants to be built en masse in the United States? And the electric cars that we could build would have noise generators that went "vroom-vroom"!

p.p.s. note that I don't care, as a U.S. Citizen, whether we build windmills, tide turbines, roof the United States with solar panels, drill for oil and mine for coal, or build nuclear power plants; the only advantage that the nuclear plants have is that they produce electrical power more cheaply and predictably than the others. If somebody comes up with cold fusion on Monday, and it's cheaper and safer than currently existing nuclear technology, great! But unless we do something intelligent now, our middle class is toast, ground between the millstones of taxation and inflation. And unemployment.

Full post as published by Arizona Bankruptcy Attorney Blog on February 12, 2011 (boomark / email).