Brooke I agree. Problem is since fuel is big business the energy companies would raise the price to US consumers because of lower availability if we export it.
One thing I've learned in the many years in management is that......greed....yup the company has to make money. Fuel exporters would benefit financially in two ways.
Selling to foreign customers, and squeezing the American Public. Always has been that way and I assume it will continue. Have to make the shareholders' happy first.
Alas.....that will be the downfall of mankind in the end. What's in it for me is the ultimate question, not how many will benefit.
Howdy, Hajo! <S>
I think that aspect of the free market has resulted in enormous positive results for mankind, not its downfall.
What you aren't counting when you describe selling to foreign customers is that those foreign customers are paying money for the product. That money goes to the people in the company, its shareholders, to the companies that sell things to that company, into the nation's economy, and is an addition to the nation's GDP and its financial well being.
Exports are good for a nation, not bad. It is especially good for the US, as we as a nation are in debt. The only way to get out of that debt is to increase exports. Countries that grow economically export a lot: the US post WWII, China now, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore (countries that went from ruin post WWII to prosperity in a generation), etc.
In the particular case of natural gas, exporting it would indeed increase US prices for natural gas. But only as part of a process whereby lots of money is coming into the US from other countries who are buying the natural gas. This adds profit into the US. Also, since natural gas is then more valuable, US companies have incentive to invest in activities related to it, which is not a great incentive right now.
Consider computers. What if at some earlier point in US history government regulation meant that computers could not be priced at anything other than 5 cents. Do you think that would be better or worse for you as a consumer of computers? At a first level, it sounds great. But what really would happen is that there would have been almost no computer industry, no investment into it in the US, no supply of good computer systems, etc. compared to what really happened.
Also, whenever thinking that selling restrictions are good, consider it applied to one's own profession. What if there was a regulation that a manager could be paid at most $20,000 per year. That might seem like it would be great for anyone who hires managers or for the population overall (as they wouldn't be paying as part of product prices anything more for managers). But in reality, what would happen is that the management job would end up turning into a job that is worth $20k per year, as most people who could do the job at a proficiency worth more than $20k per year would go to a job that pays them more than $20k per year. Capping manager salary at $20k per year would result in an inefficiency and decrease compared to a free market for manager salaries.
All of these sorts of things are covered very well in Sowell's and Hazlitt's books on economics. They really are great. I think that they are two of the best and most-important books in the world and highly recommend that anyone read them. "Basic Economics," by Sowell is longer, and "Economics in One Lesson," by Hazlitt is best if you want the briefest book possible.
There have been societies based on the principle not of free markets but on how many will benefit. That is one of the tenants of communism. There are a lot of reasons communism didn't work, but one of them definitely is that "to each according to need, from each according to ability" doesn't promote efficiency or hard work; and another is that deciding how many will benefit is not an easy thing to figure out. Central planners can't figure that out, and there are problems with who is deciding what "benefit" means and who should get it. But a free market is very, very good at figuring that out -- that's one of its main functions.
