It is sometimes thought that certain major exporters of important materials such as oils and rare earth metals have what amounts to a “weapon.” It is sad that such language is regularly used. Why, for instance, might Saudi Arabia have an oil “weapon?” Well, the idea is that they have something we want, oil, and by withholding it from us they can torture us.
I find it funny that people worry about this for two reasons:
Many people hate the Chicoms because they hold so many federal reserve notes (paper dollars), and trillions of dollars of our short-term debt, along with who knows how many Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds (after the Federal Reserve stepped in to buy a trillion of bad tranches).
This evokes the old saying, “When you owe the bank $100,000, you have a problem. When you owe the bank $100,000.000, the bank has a problem.” As Wintercow might put it, every morning everybody is drinking more hair of the dog these days.
This is not to say that we should take our eyes off the Chinese, who at the expense of their people are building a big navy and air force and aggressive intercontinental ballistic missiles as part of their peaceful space program; nor should we shut our eyes to Iran, or even Saudi Arabia.
However, we enrich them every time we throw shackles around the legs of North American energy producers, which includes Canada, the US, and Mexico.
Of course the simple answer to the question posed in paragraph 2 is that there just aren’t enough willing to buy into the plan. So socialism insists on coercing the desired behavior and it’s not simply economic. Put your child in a safety seat, no smoking almost anywhere, fasten your seat belt, build a car that gets x miles per gallon, don’t paint your house pink, mow your lawn and on and on.