[nate_meurer]

A bunch of excellent points about basic economics.

I would add, regarding this part:

  "The economy finds a way to efficiently use resources until constraints are hit."

... that "efficiently" is only true to the extent that resources are scarce. For resources that are not scarce, as was the case with oil until relatively recently, and as is the case with nat gas now in the U.S., the market optimizes for volume much more than efficiency. Hence the reason we're sucking the stuff out of the ground as fast as we possibly can.