Since everyone seems to have a sticker shock story lately:  I rolled one of my motorcycles up to a gas pump yesterday and, for the first time ever, spent more than $5 to fill the tank (small bike, small tank — I paid $5.67 for 1.1 gallons of premium).

The obvious reason is, well, obvious.

Since the US war on Iran began, oil and gas prices have skyrocketed. It’s the flip side of the Otto T. Mallery paraphrase: “When goods don’t cross borders, armies will.”  In this case, the engagement of armies — attacks on energy facilities, the near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz — is hitting the global, intertwined “supply side” of oil and its associated products rather than vice versa. Same concept, different application.

US government policy in recent years has tended toward aspirations to autarky — “economic independence” at a national level. You’ve heard the slogans. “America First!” “Buy American!” “Energy independence!”

At the level of a society or national government, autarky is a stump-stupid idea. It makes people poorer by thwarting competitive advantage.

That is: Some people in some places can do or make this or that thing less expensively than other people in other places, meaning they can sell at lower prices. The sellers do better because they sell more. The buyers do better because they pay less. Everybody wins!

Well, not exactly. Enterprises that don’t enjoy competitive advantage in Activity X don’t do better if they stick to Activity X. They lose. Instead of coming up with new business models they tend to lean on governments to “protect” them from “foreign competition” at the expense of those own governments’ consumers with tariffs and other trade barriers. In which case everybody loses … except the most politically connected enterprises with the best lobbyists.

The war on Iran is temporarily producing the same result that actual US “energy independence” — usually promoted as proposed autarky in the production/sale of oil — would deliver without “armies crossing borders.”

Almost all  oil and gas produced in the US comes from “tight formation production” — horizontally drilled wells and hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) to extract the stuff from shale . That’s more expensive than just drilling a vertical well and pumping the black gold out, as is done in the Middle East.

That’s a “competitive disadvantage” for US oil companies. The only way for US oil production to be profitable is for the price per barrel to be kept artificially high through “protectionist” measures … or war. The US producers can only profit by increasing YOUR costs.

At the level of the individual American, on the other hand, a certain amount of “energy independence” — autarky! — makes a good deal of sense.

Some Americans AREN’T experiencing sticker shock at the pump because they don’t drive gas-powered vehicles. And some of those Americans aren’t paying more for the energy to power those vehicles because they’re generating that energy themselves using home solar or wind mechanisms (or, in the case of non-electric bicycles or just plain walking, their own bodies).

It’s not total autarky. “No man is an island” and solar panels, turbines, bicycles, and calories have to come from somewhere. But it’s a lot closer to autarky than daily reliance on distant sources subject to constant political machinations or military developments.

While it’s obviously difficult, if not impossible, to become the mythical entirely self-reliant “rugged individualist,” there’s something to be said for protecting your daily life from the whims of politicians who don’t understand — or maybe just don’t care — that global free trade produces maximum prosperity.

From weaning ourselves off gasoline to planting home gardens, etc., a certain amount of “autarky” is really just smart self-defense.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wants $200 billion for the Trump administration’s illegal, ill-advised, undeclared war on Iran.

Well, maybe. “That number could move,” he says, to get “properly funded for what’s been done, for what we may have to do in the future, ensure that our ammunition is refilled, and not just refilled, but above and beyond.”

You won’t need two guesses to guess which direction “that number” will likely move in.

Will Whiskey Pete get his requested allowance bump? According to the Washington Post, unnamed “White House officials” think he’s aiming too high, and some members of Congress seem to agree.

The correct congressional response — if you think it will help, by all means pass the recommendation on to “your” “representatives”  — is a big fat goose-egg, for at least two reasons above and beyond the war being stupid and evil.

The first reason, of course, is that the war is illegal. Since Congress hasn’t declared war, the executive branch has no authority to wage war. Congress shouldn’t fund something that only Congress has the power to approve when it hasn’t exercised that power.

The second reason is that the Pentagon’s coffers are already full beyond comprehension.

The  FY 2026 “National Defense Authorization Act,” signed into law by US president Donald Trump last December, provided about $900 billion in taxpayer dollars to the US armed forces. And that’s not even the entire military budget. Non-NDAA spending brings the check to more than $1 trillion.

That’s a lot of money. It’s a lot more money than any other regime on the planet spends on “defense,” and it’s being spent to “defend” a country that  faces no credible threat of invasion and whose rulers have to constantly drum up arguments in order to pretend that it has any substantial “enemies” at all.

Only one other regime on the planet — China’s — spends as much per year on “defense” as the EXTRA money Hegseth’s panhandling for.

After more than four years of all-out war, the Russian and Ukrainian regimes are spending, respectively, about 3/4 as much and about 1/3 as much on their war machines as Hegseth’s request for MORE.

The beauty of the situation is that all Congress has to do to take control of the situation is the same thing it’s been doing: Sit on its hands, with one of those hands gripping the budgetary wallet tight.

They don’t even have to say “no.” They just have to NOT say “yes.”

We should be in, if not done with, the “trial” phase of the Constitution’s impeachment/removal protocols by now, but so far all we’ve seen is a bunch of hand-wringing and a couple of failed attempts to exercise sub-constitutional control with “war powers resolutions.”

If Congress doesn’t even possess the testicular fortitude to refrain from shelling out billions every time Hegseth sticks his hand out, what is Congress even good for?

The question kind of answers itself. I predict that Congress will fall all over itself showering your money on the nation’s most famous DUI hire.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Let me bury the lede just a bit:

In December of 1862, Union troops under the command of Ambrose Burnside crossed the Rappahannock river by pontoon bridge and occupied the town of Fredericksburg, Virginia, in an attempt to come to grips with Confederate forces under Robert E. Lee.

That first skirmish of the battle named for the town went rather easily for the Union Forces … who couldn’t help but wonder why.

“Some guessed it was because they had no ammunition to spare,” Shelby Foote relates in his excellent three-volume history of the war, “others that they were afraid of retaliation by ‘our siege guns.'”

“Still another,” Foote continues, “a veteran private, had a different idea. ‘Sh*t,’ he said. ‘They WANT us to get in. Getting out won’t be quite so smart and easy. You’ll see.”

And see they did:  Four days later, the Union troops finally skedaddled back to the other side of the river, minus nearly 1,300 killed in action, nearly 10,000 wounded, and nearly 2,000 captured or missing. Lee’s army suffered about half as many casualties and remained in control of the field.

OK, lede buried. Now let’s talk about the wholly optional, clearly idiotic, and unquestionably illegal (at least per US law on the subject) war on Iran, now well into its third week.

I doubt the Iranian regime WANTED the US and Israeli regimes to escalate the region’s long-standing tension, constant low-intensity fighting, and occasional flare-ups to full-on war for the second time in less than a year …

… but now that it’s happened, the Iranians seem intent on extracting a real price for the blunder instead of negotiating another lull or, as some keep putting it, giving Donald Trump an excuse to “declare victory” and take an “off-ramp” back to the status quo ante.

Can you blame them?

The US and Israel have effectively been at war with Iran since 1979, when the Iranian people gave US puppet dictator “Shah” Mohammad Reza Pahlavi the boot (after which hard-line Islamists, like the Bolsheviks in Russia before them, took advantage of the chaos to seize power).

Adding insult to injury,  Trump and Company are promoting Pahlavi’s son as the face of their “regime change” aspirations.

Getting out won’t be quite so smart and easy. We’re seeing.

Oil prices are up by 25-35% (depending on type of the crude). Ditto gasoline prices.

And fertilizer prices.

And, soon, the price of everything that has to be delivered using gasoline, grown using fertilizer, etc.

Which is pretty much, well, everything.

Even when — if — tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz can get back to normal, we’ll be feeling the economic after-effects for a long time. The effects of the war stretch beyond that transport choke point. The Iranians are also striking production facilities, and just this morning hit a major natural gas field in the United Arab Emirates. The damaged and destroyed infrastructure across the region isn’t going to rebuild itself.

The longer this war continues, the worse off Americans will be, above and beyond having to foot the bill — in both blood and treasure — for a war the US regime has yet to present anything resembling a rational explanation for.

Even if the Iranian people rise up and overthrow the current regime, as American pro-war flacks keep predicting, the likelihood that its replacement will be any more friendly to the US and Israel falls somewhere between “infinitesimal” and “non-existent.”

Can the Iranian regime lose this war? Yes.

Can the American people win it? No. And we never could. It was always going to make us worse off.

Our enemies aren’t in Tehran, they’re in Washington, DC.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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