Arnold -> Robert Higgs:

If we were talking about bananas, everybody would see immediately the foolishness of seeking “banana independence.” Nobody would fall for half-baked arguments about our addiction to foreign bananas or our love affair with banana bread. It’s obviously uneconomic to grow millions of bananas in this country; it could be done, but doing it would entail much greater costs than buying them from producers in places better suited to their production (that is, places where they can be produced at lower opportunity cost).

Arnold notes:

In Oil Econ 101, I wrote,

The problem with sponsoring terrorism is not that oil revenues are the source of funds. The problem with sponsoring terrorism is that it is grossly immoral.

Whether you are an anti-war liberterian like Higgs or a xenophobe about Islamic radicals like me, the economics always comes out the same: choosing the high-cost energy path is not in the interest of American citizens.

It would be interesting to list all of the causes that sound good to politicians (and presumably to voters) but which frighten me, based on past policy proposals: the family farmer, affordable housing, energy independence...

There's a wacko nexus in the family farmer who seeks energy independence. They dream of being "off the grid" as if that was an admirable aspiration. It's not that small scale energy production is bad, it's that it should be a cash crop like any other when there is a surplus beyond local consumption. Go ahead, generate your own power, brew your own fuels, make your own fertilizers, whatever. But to have enough capacity for peak loads means that there will be too much at other times and that surplus should be sold to the grid to help your neighbors. It is unsociable to do otherwise, uncivil, contentious, destructive of community. Stupid.

As Arnold and others note, with superior economic knowledge, this homely local truth scales to the whole world. Their arguments are purely economic but it is also true that seeking to hermit up is uncivil.

Being a neighbor, part of a society, however large or small, doesn't always (ever?) go smoothly. Jerks - such as those who are, or who fund, terrorists - are ever present. They are social criminals and need to be dealt with. Withdrawing from society - local or global - is no answer.