Quote:
Originally Posted by wescoent
Not a bad assessment.
Currently, the prices of virtually all commodities are determined by trading on an open market. Therefore, no matter where the commodity is sourced from, the price remains the same. If Saudi Arabia's citizens are bidding up the price of corn to $1,000 per bushel, then that's the price Americans are paying as well.
The main problem is that our world depends so much on the free movement of low priced goods across borders, if global trade gets stopped, then we descend into chaos. If people are starving in the streets because they can't get food, revolutions start popping up. The really dangerous part is when the nukes start getting lobbed. Say we cut off food shipments to India, and they threaten to nuke us if we don't send food. What do we do?
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Tell them we'd nuke them back. (duh)
No rationally run government would risk such an "everybody loses" proposition. (plus it wouldn't get them any food)This is the "Mutual Assured Destruction" doctrine that kept the US and the USSR from destroying each other (and the rest of the planet) throughout the cold war.
You really just need to worry about the NON-rationally run governments lobbing nukes. You know, the psycho, nut-job dictators. Not the ones that talk smack, the ones that REALLY might do something that stupid. There are only a few of them, and we know who they are. And even THEY haven't been dumb enough to start lobbing nukes so far.