Energy Independence - Biggest universal politician baloney since "Social Security is Solvent"

William O'Keefe, CEO of the George Marshall institute once again explains basic market economics to our 'leaders'.

If truth in advertising requirements applied to political slogans and proposals, energy independence would never have survived its first utterance from President Nixon. Although it is an illusion that has no basis in reality, it has persisted as a claimed policy objective since the early 1970s. Energy Independence is just another political scam used to take taxpayer dollars and enrich favored constituencies. Isn't that what the ethanol mandate is all about?
The idea as articulated is that we take steps to become independent of all imported oil. even though the cause of concern is oil imported from the Persian Gulf. Over the course of the last several decades, we have imported oil from Canada, Mexico, and North Sea producers, none of which should be a source of concern to us.
Not only is energy independence an illusion but if we sought to eliminate all oil imports or even just those from the Persian Gulf, we would impose such a large cost on our economy that we would harm our competitiveness and export more jobs to other countries. Further, even if we could some how magically eliminate imports, we could not insulate our economy from the effects of actions that disrupted the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf. Our economy is connected to those of our trading partners and if they were harmed by an oil price spike or a disruption of supply, our economy would be impacted as well.

The rest here.