Drillers, engineers, constructors, fab yard workers, machine tool factory workers, when they are employed they buy cars, they buy houses, they buy clothes and sporting goods and take their families to restaurants, they vacation, they buy expensive toys, they send their kids to college, and on and on. And they pay income taxes and sales taxes on everything they make and everyething they do.
Take down the barriers and you'll cut the half trillion we send out of the country buying fuel, radically, and you'll put the whole country back to work. All that oil pays royalties into the treasury here, instead of paying royalties into foreign government treasuries elsewhere around the world.
To sit bankrupt with double digit unemployment with your productive workers standing on street corners, home builders hitting the skids, carmakers drying up and blowing away for want of paying customers, while oil comes gurgling up through the ocean floor untapped is crazy stupid. In my opinion.
And to keep electing the people who keep us bankrupt and unemployed and keep electing them, at some point we have to face the fact that we are complicit in our own misery.
Free people do not generally vote for politicians who seek to take their freedom away.