At current oil prices, we will send $700 billion dollars out of the country this year alone. Projected over the next 10 years the cost will be $10 trillion — it will be the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind. E. Frank Stephenson responds in the April issue of The Freeman:
The $700 billion that Americans spend annually to purchase oil from other countries is a price not a transfer. A true transfer— unemployment benefits or a taxpayer subsidy to a failing company—is a payment made to someone who provides no good or service in exchange. By nature transfers are zero-sum. One person “gives” through coercive taxation; the other person receives.
By contrast, when one makes a purchase, the money one pays is the price of the good, one side of a mutually beneficial voluntary exchange. Each party to the transaction trades away something in return for something else he or she values more highly. If I spend $2 for a cup of coffee, I’ve made a purchase not a transfer. I get the coffee, which I value more than anything else I could have bought for the $2, and the coffee shop gets the $2, which it values more than the coffee.
For the $700 billion we send to oil exporters, we get something in return—oil. Our receipt of millions of barrels of oil in exchange for that money is hardly a transfer. We receive a versatile commodity that can be used for everything from making plastics to fueling family vacations. The exporters receive the $700 billion that they can then use to purchase other goods and services. MP: Last summer I wrote:
Foreign oil producers like Canada, Saudi Arabia, Mexico (top three countries for U.S. imports) send us their oil, and we send them "green pieces of paper with dead presidents' pictures," aka as USDs. That imported oil helps to fuel our economy, cars and factories, raising our standard of living.
Oil producers in Canada, Saudi Arabia and Mexico now have US dollars, which must be spent back in the U.S. on American goods and services, or invested in the U.S. financial markets, either by the oil producers, or by those who buy the USDs from them.
Importing oil certainly involves a transfer, but it's not a transfer of wealth, it's a market transaction involving the exchange of oil for currency. If it IS a transfer of wealth, it seems like we got the better end of the deal: Their valuable natural resources get transferred to the U.S., in exchange for paper currency, which gets spent back here eventually.
In T. Boone Pickens' version, it seems like wealth gets transferred overseas without any benefit to the U.S. But oil imports, like all trade, involves mutually beneficial exchange. Remember trade is win-win, not win-lose (like T. Boone Pickens suggests).
One dictionary definition of "wealth" is "an abundance of valuable resources." In that case, wouldn't T. Boone Pickens' "greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind" actually be a transfer of wealth in the form of valuable natural resources (oil) TO the United States, and not a transfer of wealth FROM the United States in the form of paper currency?
T. Boone Pickens-- As imports grow and world prices rise, the amount of money we send to foreign nations every year is soaring. At current oil prices, we will send $700 billion dollars out of the country this year alone — that's four times the annual cost of the Iraq war.
Projected over the next 10 years the cost will be $10 trillion — it will be the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind.
MP: Now let's see here. Foreign oil producers like Canada, Saudi Arabia, Mexico (top three countries for U.S. imports) send us their oil, and we send them "green pieces of paper with dead presidents' pictures," aka as USDs. That imported oil helps to fuel our economy, cars and factories, raising our standard of living.
Oil producers in Canada, Saudi Arabia and Mexico now have US dollars, which must be spent back in the U.S. on American goods and services, or invested in the U.S. financial markets, either by the oil producers, or by those who buy the USDs from them.
Importing oil certainly involves a transfer, but it's not a transfer of wealth, it's a market transaction involving the exchange of oil for currency.
If it IS a transfer of wealth, it seems like we got the better end of the deal: Their valuable natural resources get transferred to the U.S., in exchange for paper currency, which gets spent back here eventually.
In T. Boone Pickens' version, it seems like wealth gets transferred overseas without any benefit to the U.S. But oil imports, like all trade, involves mutually beneficial exchange. Remember trade is win-win, not win-lose (like T. Boone Pickens suggests), or lose-lose (the way the Soviets supposedly described a market exchange -buyers lose their money, and sellers lose their goods). Update: One dictionary definition of "wealth" is "an abundance of valuable resources." In that case, wouldn't T. Boone Pickens' "greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind" be a transfer of wealth in the form of valuable natural resources (oil) TO the United States, and not a transfer of wealth FROM the United States in the form of paper currency?
Rush Limbaugh Quotes Carpe Diem: "Buying Foreign Oil is An Exchange of Wealth, NOT A Transfer"
This CD post (about T. Boone Pickens' rantings about oil and the "biggest transfer of wealth in history") was read today in its entirety on the Rush Limbaugh radio show (transcript here).
Limbaugh comments: T. Boone, he knows better than this. He knows this is not a transfer of wealth. A transfer of wealth is taxing producers, taking it away from them and giving it to non-producers. Transfers of wealth are things like the estate tax when the money you take from somebody doesn't redound to them in any way, shape, manner, or form. But this purchase of oil every year from foreign sources is not a transfer of wealth. It is an exchange of wealth.
Boone Pickens says we spend $700 billion a year on foreign oil, which he calls a "transfer of wealth." But exchanging money for oil at the market price is an exchange of things of equal value. If we didn't value their oil more than our dollars, we wouldn't participate in such a bargain (MP: ECON 101).
He laments that the U.S. consumes "25% of the world's oil." The phraseology is common, and misleading. Oil is produced to meet demand. He might as well complain that, with 25% of the world's GDP, we consume 25% of the world's advertising. As Mr. Pickens says, we can't drill our way out of the dilemmas of living in the world. But drilling is one of many things we can do that are worth doing. Over time, the price mechanism and technology will tell us how to harness the energy that is infinite around us. There's the sun, the tides, geothermal and nuclear -- energy is not in short supply; only know-how is. And a shortage of know-how is a problem that our society, as long as its basic incentives remain intact, is constantly solving every single day.
CS Monitor: What's the most pragmatic, pro-American, pro-jobs, bipartisan, economically feasible, environmentally-sound piece of legislation before congress right now? If you said Health Care, go stick your head in an oven...its the Natural Gas Act aka HR 1835!
