« Duties of Citizens ... or the Rights of Clients? | Main | "Sadism" or "fascism" or "nihilism" »
May 18, 2006
Hot Air and Cheap Gas
Look, I don't like paying $60 to fill up my small car any more than anyone else. But we seem to have adopted the idea that we have a right to gas under $3 a gallon. No such right exists. Until the gas hits the tank in your car, someone else owns it. Asking the government to force a gas station to sell you gas at the price you want is like asking them to force the baker to sell you cheaper bread, or the vineyard cheaper wine. That's not how capitalist societies work.The really perverse thing about all of this is that at the same time they're carrying on about high gas prices, the same politicians are talking about the importance of alternative energy and our "oil dependence." But alternative energy sources will emerge the day they become more efficient and profitable than gasoline.
So long as gas is cheap, gas will continue to be our preferred source of energy. Once gas grows scarce, and consequently more expensive, other fuel sources will become lucrative -- at which point someone will develop them, sell them, and get rich from them.
But politicians can't just sit back and let the market take its course. They need to control things. So even as they're bending over backward to keep gas artificially inexpensive (staving off market incentives to develop alternative fuels), they're giving billions of taxpayer dollars to research and development boondoggles (read: corporate welfare) to find replacements for gas. It's waste stacked on waste stacked on waste.
"Political Posturing on Gas Prices Mostly Hot Air," by Radley Balko, Fox News, May 17, 2006
Posted at May 18, 2006 06:34 AM | Categories: Politics
· Comments (0)Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://twoseasmedia.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/753
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)