I had always thought of Alaska as a conservative, frontier-like place of laissez-faire, only to find out it’s a welfare queen.
A previous FReeper described it to me as "Redneck Socialist". I lived there for 4 years. A beautiful place, but his description had a little too much truth in it.
Conservatism usually respects and embraces normal and natural phenomena. It’s frequently astonishing to me how it often doesn’t respect and embrace the normal and natural inexorable decline of net oil joules.
Downward is inexorable and inescapable reality, and it’s normal and natural for US oil — especially when faced with the utter explosion of Chinese consumption. These progressive notions that tax policy can change the reality of a glass that is being drained eventually goes empty are frankly shameful, and they are the sort of notions that lead to refusal to burn up everyone elses oil first and eventually have complete global dominance.