"The Bad economy wasn't cause by high energy prices."
Yes it was. Else those bubbles would have busted later. Look up the price of energy compared to the real value of money and you can predict almost every crisis for almost a century. It peaks right before the crash. After the crash it falls, and after a period of low energy prices econ boosts again and increases energy prices again.
"It was caused by fiscal irresponsibility by too many people."
Partly true, people couldn't maintain the bubbles because everything went up in price. Everything went up in price because production and transport costs where higher. Production and transport costs where higher because energy prices skyrocketed. If there wasn't the house bubble it would have been something else. Even if there were no bubbles, we would all be poorer no matter what.
We can afford all this stuff not because we work so hard, but because the resources to produce it are very cheep. We successfully replaced labor from people with energy(coal, oil) that does the work for us. The replacement is a hundred times more productive as the original workforce. That is why we are so rich. Without it, we can't feed even 1/3 of worlds population at this moment let go produce and consume a lot.
