U.S. oil guzzling keeps enriching our worst enemies

Free-market purists are getting a lot of mileage out of scoffing at the hysteria about rising oil prices. From a strictly economic point of view, they’ve got a point. Even with crude selling at $70 a barrel and gasoline at $3 a gallon, the U.S. economy continues to expand.

It grew at a healthy annualized rate of 4.8 percent in the first quarter, and there has been no sign of a slowdown since. Oil is a smaller part of the economy than it was during the oil shocks of the 1970s, and retail prices are still half of what heavily taxed Europeans pay