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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

You're 90% of the way there.

The US is also sovereign and if things would become really bad the government would just ban exports.

Ireland wasn't sovereign and it turns out, as much as other countries act brotherly (not that the UK really did), nobody really cares about you like you care.

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Depends what 'sovereign' implies. The will of the people? Or maybe the will of those that lobby government the hardest (e.g. oil companies)? If the latter, then export bans might not arrive anytime soon.

'Sovereign' here means that the US govt is able to impose export restrictions, not that the People's will or special interests' desires are relevant. Of course 'can' != 'will'.

Interestingly, my dictionary gives the following (amongst other definitions of course):

> possessing supreme or ultimate power: in modern democracies the people's will is in theory sovereign.

Your dictionary is wrong.

For example, in the UK Parliament is sovereign, not the people. That's effectively how it is in representative democracies or republics where there is no fast representative recall mechanism.

The U.S. Constitution doesn't say that Congress is sovereign, but the effect is the same. For that matter, the U.S. President has a great deal of power.

Sovereign doesn't mean any of those in this context. It means that the US can set its foreign and domestic policies as it pleases. How it decides those policies is another matter.

Banning exports would be legitimately catastrophic geopolitically.

Tariffs are mostly just politics and pretty heavily partisan. Banning oil exports would be objectively evil.

I think banning oil exports would never happen since oil shareholders would scream, but why would it be evil?

Some countries rely on oil imports to produce agricultural products, and suddenly cutting them off the global market would kill hundreds of millions from hunger over the next year. Look at what happened in Cuba. Without china giving them old solar panels and used batteries, they would have revolted already. They still have a huge food insecurity issue for next year, especially if the huricane season gets bad.

Because the US started this mess, and it would essentially shift all the cost onto other countries who had no part in it.

In US oil exports were banned till 2016 did you know?

The UK parliament thought it a good moral lesson Irish should starve because they were the wrong religion

In modern times we have a special word for what they did, but I've noticed British people are <<extremely>> touchy when it's used.

Britain was barely democratic at the time of the famine. It’s silly to blame the current generation for something their ancestors did. Even if the people you are complaining about were alive then they were unlikely to have any influence over the situation.

Ouch, I found the touchy Brit.

> It’s silly to blame the current generation for something their ancestors did.

As silly as it is, it's a widespread practice around the world.

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