Crude Whining

Lord, I'm tiring of this Big Oil price fixing/gouging stuff, and I fear it's just getting started.

I recently heard "they" were doing "this" so we'd buy more Prius-type cars.

Really? The oil companies are raising prices so we'll buy cars that allow us to buy less gas? Interesting theory. I guess it makes sence once you find out the truth, that Toyota is really an oil company; it's just posing as a car company.

Thomas Sowell's got a great (of course) wrap-up on the ridiculousness of the issue at Real Clear Politics. It's like striking a vein of gems in your backyard mine. Here's just one passage:

Prices are a symptom of an underlying reality. Politicians can seize on the symptom and even pass laws dealing with it, without changing the underlying reality.

Prices are like a thermometer reading. When someone has a fever, it is not going to do any good to put the thermometer in ice water to bring down the reading. If you think the fever is gone, it may not be long before the patient is gone, if you don't do something about what is causing the fever.

Laura Ingraham was playing some idiot congressman this morning who faulted the President for not getting us all to walk and ride bikes to work after 9/11. Instead of whining, why isn't he trying to get his constituents to do it, and see how successful he is.

Besides, that would be 17 miles for me, each way. Our nation's neighborhoods have been planned in a free market, where responding to consumer demand is key. Consumers, most of them, don't want to live smashed into urban environments, so most of us live in suburbs. It's a phenomenon that started in the 1880s with the introduction of the streetcar, and it continues.

So we're not walking to work. We're not reducing our use of oil much at all, but we whine when prices go up. Of course they're up. Material costs are higher, demand is static and high, ergo prices go up.

Buy a hybrid, an E85 or a diesel, move next to your job, take the bus, or just grin and bear it, remembering that in Japan and Europe the price is $6 or $7 a gallon. Just don't whine.

Drill offshore, drill in ANWAR, exploit shale, build refineries. Just don't whine.

The important thing is to cut off the Middle East's terror-funding petrodollars. Not whining about ExxonMobil.

Tags: Oil, Gas prices, Price controls, ExxonMobil, Hybrid, E85, Diesel