Must the Government Combat Americans’ Addiction to Foreign Bananas?

At The Independent Institute website Robert Higgs asks Must the Government Combat Americans’ Addiction to Foreign Bananas? Higgs points out that

Americans, we are told again and again, are “addicted to foreign oil” and “in love with the automobile.”

He then suggests that

Suppose a serious policy of “energy independence” were actually implemented, rather than being merely spewed out along with the rest of the political hot air. Would we be better off? Absolutely not. We would be vastly poorer because we would have to sacrifice a great deal more of the non-oil products we now produce and consume in order to acquire the petroleum products we demanded.

Higgs continues by arguing

If we were talking about bananas, everybody would see immediately the foolishness of seeking “banana independence.” Nobody would fall for half-baked arguments about our addiction to foreign bananas or our love affair with banana bread. It’s obviously uneconomic to grow millions of bananas in this country; it could be done, but doing it would entail much greater costs than buying them from producers in places better suited to their production (that is, places where they can be produced at lower opportunity cost).

The argument with regard to oil, or anything else, is identical and it is identical for any country, not just the US.