My guy John Tamny over at RealClearMarkets, a Friend of the Blog, provides a reality check on the sudden public enthusiasm for oil drilling:
Record oil prices have created a growing consensus that we should open up off-limits areas in the U.S. for drilling. Nothing against drilling, but even if the discoveries are massive they won't in any way shield Americans from monetary mistakes that make oil expensive. More importantly, comparative advantage is being forgotten. The reality is that even in the best of times, the oil business is a bad one. With there being no such thing as foreign oil in the economic sense (even if all oil came from Iran, we would still buy it as though it were sourced in the U.S.), we in a perfect world would import 100% of our petroleum so that our limited human capital could pursue higher-value work.
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