If it ever looks like Congress is really going to nationalize them, I'd advise you to get a bicycle and make sure you're fit enough to use it. 'Cause Congress would be doing it in order to loot them.

In short order they'd work in the same dilatory and/or dysfunctional manner as public toilets, public freeways, public busses, Amtrak, the Postal Service, air traffic control, and almost everything else that's ultimately run by government. Heck, somehow government has even made our numerically trivial commitment in Iraq - a whole 140,000 troops, a massive, overwhelming 0.05% of our population - into an insupportable burden.

Of course, if it's wartime, we could impose wartime income taxes, and make the Lee Raymonds of the world pay 98% at the margin. But then again, that might disincentify football players and Hollywood "stars". If that happened, what would the Great Shiftless Moron Mass do for entertainment, except maybe to shoot even more holes in highway signs?

There are only two ways to allocate a scarce resource--through market forces (price) or through force.   We either pay the higher price, or we do without, or we seize foreign oil fields, which I suppose is what we may be doing in the Middle East.

We have an economy where the majority of Americans live off the discretionary income of other Americans.  This is not in any way sustainable.  Whether we like large homes and large SUV's or not, we are going to be forced to become a country focused on providing essential goods and services.  

My opinion for quite some time is that oil exporters are going to seriously begin to question whether they should continue to give us oil in exchange for dollars, and to question their rate of production.