Oil And War

How a persistent delusion of US citizens determines when the USA goes to war

In most countries on Earth, and all across all of the OECD bar the USA, citizens understand that the price of the fuel they pump into their motor vehicles is the result of a great many complex factors. The “price of gas” as it’s known in the USA is, for people in all the educationally adequate nations of the world, simply one more cost they have to cope with. The price of fuel is no more important than the price of food, the cost of housing, and all the other things we have to pay for in order to maintain our daily lives.

In the USA, however, things are different. Bizarrely different.

As the USA was the first nation on Earth to be shaped by the combined powers of the automotive industry, the chemical industry, and the petroleum industry, US citizens use their automobiles to a far greater extent than occurs elsewhere. Moreover, taxes on petroleum products have always been low in the USA compared to those imposed by other nations. This led the USA to produce vehicles with large but hopelessly inefficient engines that consume vast quantities of fuel for very little in the way of forward motion. So US citizens pour more fuel into their vehicles than nearly anyone else on the planet. As such, US citizens believe they have an inalienable “right” to…