If the US has such great reserves as has been claimed, why do the american citizens get raped with gas prices and I don't think even the Dakotas give cash back to the people. And why do the oil companies get to destroy vast tracks of land building pipelines from canada to Texas, only to sell most of it off to other countries?
"As you suggest in your post, but do not develop, Saudi Arabia and some of the UAE nations have considerable oil reserves, and give their citizens benefits and just plain cash based on them.
But are Saudis all that happy?"
Reread my post. It was that point that I was attempting to make. Norway, like northern Minnesota and eastern North Dakota (packed with Scandanavian Lutherans - as Garrison Keillor spoofed weekly), is a small, homogeneous population and is culturally very different than, for example Saudi Arabia.
My un-fully fleshed~OUTT example was terrorism. Rampant in Saudi Arabia (a country in which Pakistanis and Filipinos do the work and Saudis basically shop and manage), butt, other than one guy, is non-existent in Lutheran Norway and northern Minnesota/eastern ND. There are no suicide bombings in Eveleth, MN, home of the USA Hockey Hall of Fame - the most violent it getts in that region are bar fights and hockey games, and even then everybuddy says "I'm sorry" afterwards or at least by the time they meet up at the local diner for breakfast. Like Norway, the northern MN/ND area has no significant urban population. Culturally, Norway and Ely or even 'metropolitan' Duluth or Grand Forks, the Oslos of the Northland, are no comparison to Riyadh, Chicago, Caracas, Havana, Pyongyang, or Albania (formerly socialist). Or East Germany for that matter. Simply compare East Germany to West Germany, and which people was the Berlin Wall keeing from crossing? Culturally, both countries had the same people. One culture, butt two systems - neither of which sat on a Teapot Dome fulla light/intermediate sweet crude and natural gas ike Norway. In fact the lack of resources in Germany is a main driver for WW2 - it needed to access the resources of others. So West Germany and East Germany - same culture, same environemnt; one system made people rich and happy, the other made people want to flee to the other side. Pretty decent experiment. East and West Berlin - same dealio.
Put the people of northern MN/eastern ND or Scandanavia in almost any system of government and they will generally do OK - it's basically a small world, homogeneous, group of like-minded people who come from basically rural heritage (even if some now have moved to Oslo or Helsinki - the culture is rural in the recent past) and who share the same Protestant/Lutheran values and bleefs. Lutherans and Calvinists don't 'disagree' to the extent that say Sunni and Shi'a Muslims do. Or Hindu and Muslims. Or Buddhists and Musiims. At least I'm nott aware that Scandinavia is as unstable as the Middle East, North Africa, or South Asia.
You cannot look at 4.5 million Norwegians (HALF of metro Chicago) sitting on a shitload of high-grade oil and natural gas, and say "see, socialism works" and ignore the abject failure of socialism virtually everywhere else - including Sweden, BTW, which was forced to wholly restructure its welfare state in the 1990s because ... it ran ~OUTT of money - unlike Norway, Sweden doesn't have the gold mine of North Sea oil and gas. They have a lot of timber, huge nickel and iron ore, and hydro resources, butt nott like Norway's petro-empire.
When there are riots on the campuses of St. Cloud State and Makato State, and suicide bombings at the US Hockey Hall of Fame or someone burns down the Valley Corn Maze in East Grand Forks, killing dozens of kids at Halloween while declaring jihad on fly fishermen, then you can tell me that culture has little to do with happiness.
Until then, beware the Norwegian/Swedish Lutheran mafia - they are just really good at hiding all their criminal activity to appear harmless to the single policemen in Lake Woebegone who is either found at Tim Horton's or at the lakefront Snack Shack diner and gathering place, where the coffee is always hot and even if it's cold ~OUTTside you can come in for some warm buns.
Typical criminal thug northern Minnesotan 'biker' gang = bad peeples (BTW, betcha at least three of these guys are named Ole)
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