America in Reverse (Feb. 13, 2008)

We Americans have a great passion – curative 20/20 hindsight. We too have an all consuming deficiency – that being courageous preventative vision.

We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and allotted hundreds of thousands of security and other personnel to find a few Jihadists, unearth a few unsophisticated plots. That’s cost-ineffectiveness at its most extreme, a formula with which al-Qaeda can always out leverage us, out wait us. No matter how wealthy America is, we just cannot afford, indefinitely, to allocate such monetary treasure and such human resources to plug all the holes, secure all the borders and protect all our vulnerable facilities as long as we intend to remain an open, free and democratic society.

We have conversely, apart from our military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, spent very little on preemptive planning and implementation. Whether it be via focused taxes on gasoline (preferably with concomitant reductions in personal taxes) or Flex Fuel Vehicles (at $100 per conversion) to accommodate ethanol and methanol, we continue to blunder ahead, subsidizing terrorist regimes and Jihadist organizations by transferring hundreds of billions of oil dollars every year to the Middle East (not to ignore Chavez and Putin, et al.). We donate our gold to the Islamists and they give us petroleum. They don’t build hospitals, universities and science research institutes. Instead they build Hamas, Hezbollah, bin Laden, Ahmadinejad, intercontinental missiles, WMDs and suicide bombers.

We are clearly missing the obvious points, the elephant in our parlor.

Based on the inevitable cost-ineffectiveness of Homeland Security and on the greatest transfer of wealth the world has ever witnessed, we are engaged in a losing battle, in our demise towards insolvency and “too little too late.”

If we mandate and legislate for Flex Fuel Vehicles, if we thereby open up competition to all sources of energy, if we tax our gasoline habits and strengthen our energy alternatives, then and only then will gasoline usage reduce, then prices at the pump will drop, then the great wealth transfer will slow and the terrorists and Jihadists will finally have a deficit budget instead of Washington.

Then and only then will we be cost-effective, will we outlast and outspend our enemies and their countless madrassas. Then and only then will we be building a solid inheritance for our children.

Our current self-indulgent policies of accommodation, our fantasies of immediate gratification and our appeasement politics might very well result in the nuclear loss of some of our cities or the debasement of our wealth or both. Unless we spend more wisely, more preemptively, more courageously, we risk the future of America, the greatest experiment in freedom and democracy the world has ever known.