Our people have starved twice in my lifetime. They are not about to leave something so vital to them, up to the whims of supply and demand, other government embargoes and manipulation, to say nothing of the vagaries of weather and the threat of war. He conceded to me that export subsidies are another matter and should be ended. But they still have them. In sugar alone, the European Union literally breaks the world market with its dumped sugar.
Energy is the same.
And many of the advocates of free trade speak with forked tongue when it comes to energy. Let me tell you what happened when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. In October President Bush sent an urgent message to all of the governors warning of impending short supplies of propane, particularly in the New England states, because most of the propane there was refined in Kuwait. President Bush acted swiftly and forcefully, as he should have. There had been over 100 oil refineries shut down in the U.S. in the ten years preceding the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq.