There is so much wrong with your post in terms of fuzzy logic and hazy thinking that I don’t really know where to start. I’ll first say that it’s not possible to be a ‘servant’ to a voluntarist market. ‘Forcing’ someone to take part of a pacifistic entity like capitalism makes no sense (like almost all of your post).

Mr. Woods, your comments are exactly what I was talking about in my previous post.

To many people – such as yourself – the market is some some of vague entity that one is a serf to – commercialism and all that. What is the market doing today? what regulations does it need? is there a better system than the free market? I don’t really believe all of those economists – I think that X is the best policy option – etc.

You, like other people, are arguing in a way that makes me realize that you don’t understand a fundamental concept of reality – the market is not political; the market has nothing to do with religion; the market has nothing to do with independence, dependence, and certainly not slavery.

To wit; the market doesn’t exist. Neither does capitalism. Neither does the idea of being a ‘slave’ to this ‘entity’.

The market is just *reality* Mr. Woods. It is how people deal with scare resources. Economic law is the same as physical law. We don’t argue about what goes up must come down. In the same way we can’t argue against free trade, or make silly statements concerning God or forcing people to adopt a voluntarist means of life – something so absurd that I wont go into detail about it.

Please get educated. If you are posting on this blog there is no excuse for you not to be.

That being said, I still think the political posturing on “energy independence” is a complete scam. I don’t trust a word either one of the candidates (or most politicians, for that matter) say.

Probably the worst thing that can be said about economics is how people attempt to see the outcomes of a certain policy in favor of their own, according to their political beliefs.

Take a recent article on Mises.org, where an Austrian author makes the common sense claim that government work jobs do not create wealth, they just tranfer wealth around by the political, not productive, means.

It took all of ten seconds for the established armchair economists of this world to make posts containing more BS than a cattle trail this side of Texas. What is the difference between people voting for a road or energy institution to be created for the public? (Misunderstanding of the difference of State versus Market in production), and my favorie, ‘just because the government might destroy some jobs in making roads and public energy institutions, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t create them later (broken window fallacy, uh, sheer idiocy).

The ‘Energy Independence’ crisis is just an example of how people don’t understand economics, unfortunately some economists included. Until the base problem of ethics of liberty and economics is solved, we will deal with issues like this all the time, as the American public just hasn’t a clue.

One thing is for sure; it annoys and angers the hell out of me. No man has an excuse to be an idiot, and no idiot has an excuse to be stupid. There is nothing difficult about 90% of all economics. What is difficult is getting the American people to stop having down syndrome.

[Exactly as was said in “The Goods on Gas.”–IM]