The oil markets are rattled. Iran has decided to play bouncer at the Strait of Hormuz and oil prices are over $100 with confident predictions of $150 circulating around. Analysts are invoking “the mother of all disaster scenarios,” and commentators are rummaging through the 1970s for analogies. The mood is grim, the forecasts grimmer. But here is an unfashionable question: what if expensive oil is not a catastrophe, but a correction? Not a breakdown, but a belated alignment of incentives in an economy that has spent decades mistaking cheap energy for sound strategy?