World oil price hits agriculture double

It's bad enough to run the family chariot down to the gas station for a serving of that $4 petrol.

Those in the worst shape are those that make their living using fuel, like truckers. Even worse are farmers and ranchers, who not only run trucks and tractors over the soil on $5 diesel, but use fertilizer made from oil, pump irrigaton water using oil or natural gas, and then ship the resulting crop on trucks whose fees are jacked up because of high fuel prices.

This is a serious economic dislocation, and it is needless, if only the liberals in Congress would stand back and let the free enterprise system solve it. The United States has 139 billion barrels of oil readily accessible in Alaska and off the coasts of California, Florida and Texas that Congress will not allow to be drilled, because they are "environmentally fragile."

Using old methods, with less "green" mentality, that could once have been the case. Modern equipment and technology leaves very little footprint and requires dramatically less land than it once did to drill for oil. The various oil spills of the last 10 years have led the way in developing "spill proof" technologies. Actual environmental damage, and particularly potential, damage are miniscule now days.

Can you imagine what 139 billion barrels of non-OPEC oil would do to the world market and the price of oil? Just watch how OPEC prices oil, when suddenly the United States starts importing about half as much. The free enterprise system, if allowed to function unfettered, can solve this problem.

What we have are Big Government Liberals, who want to control the economy, people's lives and livelihoods--making everything completely dependent on them. It is a Robin Hood socialist scheme, to level the playing field, so everyone is equally poor and dependent. They don't want the oil crisis to be solved. They want oil prices to go even higher, so they can have even more contol.