People blame oil for costing them a lot of money. But the funny thing is that some also blame oil for making them a lot of money. The idea that oil is inherently bad, even when good, reaches its zenith in the so-called “curse of oil.”

According to this classic cliché, oil is the natural resource equivalent of Midas’s touch or W.W. Jacob’s “The Monkey’s Paw.” It blights all those who wish for it and brings only misery and woe to the poor nations that have the misfortune to be sitting atop billions of dollars.

Oil is an inanimate object that carries no karma, mojo, or feng shui that I can discern. But whenever it is found in some backward, impoverished, corrupt, authoritarian stink-hole, it gets blamed for making the place a backward, impoverished, corrupt, authoritarian stink-hole. And now that oil is well into triple digits, the curse-of-oil crowd is writing new verses to the same old song. Consider this quote from a “noted expert” found in a recent Reuters piece entitled “Is Oil Windfall a Curse for Poor Countries?” It says that “oil-producing countries today are being hit with a tsunami of cash, and the danger is that they will squander it just like they squandered the surpluses of the 1970s.”

My God, this “oil” force truly is ruthless. It drowns the poor in cash. Why, they won’t be expecting that! (But then again, men without money rarely suffer buyer’s remorse.)

Likewise, Thomas Friedman recently pinned the blame for an alleged decrease in world freedom on the dreaded oil curse. It’s his first law of petro-politics: “As the price of oil goes up, the pace of freedom goes down. As the price of oil goes down, the pace of freedom goes up.“

If this is true, then surely it’s time to let the freedom fighters into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, I say. But Friedman is more interested in what author Larry Diamond has to say and Diamond has communicated a shocking correlation: “There are 23 countries in the world that derive at least 60 percent of their exports from oil and gas and not a single one is a real democracy,” explains Diamond. “Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and Nigeria are the poster children” for this trend, “where leaders grab the oil tap to ensconce themselves in power.”

I hate to cast doubt on the cause-and-effect nature of this neat relationship, but the problem with these countries is not that oil is inherently bad. It’s that they have so little going on in the way of real economic development that whatever oil happens to be there is enough to be 60 percent of all exported value. To be blunt, if these nations were competent enough to bake a bigger economic pie, the piece we call “oil” wouldn’t look so huge.

Oil, unlike most wealth, is not a product of a nation’s culture, it is a simple accident of geology. If the biggest thing your country has going for it economically is an accident that occurred millions of years ago, it has issues that go way beyond the allegedly corrupting influence of geology.

Countries “cursed” with oil are like those oft-quoted people who, in bankruptcy, tell reporters that winning the lottery has “ruined” their lives. Well, I have news for them: it wasn’t the lottery. It’s the fact that such people are financially and socially dysfunctional. They were dysfunctional before they won, and equally dysfunctional after they won. But after they won they could afford a much more visible scale of dysfunction.

The same is true of the oil-cursed nations. Free money didn’t make them poor. And the seizure of widely distributed oil fields by some national boss-man didn’t make them authoritarian. All oil did was make the place matter enough to merit news coverage by someone other than the BBC International Service and the Christian Science Monitor.

Does anyone really believe that Switzerland, if it were found tomorrow to be sitting atop huge oil fields, would become an impoverished dictatorship? Or that Iran without oil would be a Jeffersonian democracy with a great human rights record? Oil is not the critical difference between these countries. You can’t blame the amplifier for the music.

Finding oil is simply finding wealth and power. If oil is a curse, we should all be so cursed.