Oil man whines about oil prices
When OPEC announced this week that it would cut oil production, the White House complained that oil prices should be set by market forces. This is disingenuous even by the standards of the Bush administration, on at least a couple of levels.
Of course OPEC didn’t say they were going to raise prices. They said they planned to cut production. Everybody knows cutting production will have the result of increasing prices, because that’s how market forces operate.
What they really mean, of course, is that oil prices should be set not by market forces, but by political forces exerted by the United States. The fact that OPEC can still engage in price gouging just underscores the failure of U.S. terror tactics to subdue the rest of the Middle East. After so much killing, so much threatening, and so much bribery, the OPEC nations still aren’t taking orders particularly well. This must be frustrating for the emperor.
Of course, it’s rankest hypocrisy for any capitalist, let alone a crony of the oil companies, to complain about price gouging. Predatory pricing is one of the central features of capitalism, and capitalists love it as long as they aren’t on the receiving end.
Did Bush intervene when Enron was inflating the electric bills of California consumers? Nope. Did Bush get indignant about the Microsoft monopoly and all its attendant price distortions? No, it was the Bush administration that let them off with little more than a some good-natured finger-wagging.
Absent from all this empty talk of “market forces” is a discussion of the demand side of energy prices. Bush just last month extended a regulation permitting car makers to produce less fuel-efficient vehicles. This move makes perfect sense if your agenda is to increase oil company profits by maximizing demand. And, of course, no sense at all if you complain about high gasoline prices.