Thursday, April 07, 2022
Big Oil vs. Big B.S.
The price of oil has dramatically increased of late and, like clockwork, Democrats begin congressional hearings to grandstand against the greedy oil company’s “record profits.”
Of course anyone with the most rudimentary understanding of economics realizes what the factors are that drive costs of any product. “Supply and demand” used as a description of processes in a free market is not just a principle in macro-economics. It’s a psychological principle on the way individual humans judge the value and desirability of goods and services.
A concerted effort to impose a “green new deal” upon Americans is certainly not beneficial to low prices for the current sources of energy.
If one hears the rants of modern day Luddites, one would think that oil companies simply pick a random — high — price and take people’s money. The obvious thing being missed here is that there are two sides to the equation. In exchange for the money given — however low or high it may be — the industry in question has to give the customer something. Only the government can establish an arbitrary amount of your financial resources to literally seize, and often give nothing in return. If they do provide a “service,” it’s often something you didn’t ask for. (Few Americas have asked their government to give free smart phones to people illegally breaching our country’s border).
Regardless of the cost, buying the product of fossil fuels includes the substantial cost of searching for the resource, finding it, extracting it, refining it, and transporting it around the world so you can spend five minutes filling up and driving to the latest anti-capitalist protest.
Young people in particular, raised on the crusading political ignorance of milquetoast teacher union drones, hold images in their mind of greedy fat cats destroying the environment solely to sell gas to selfish drivers. Of course among those drivers are those who drive buses and ambulances and fly planes (including the private ones preferred by people like John Kerry).
Also missed in the cartoon appraisal of big oil “greed” is the fact that virtually everything we use that provides civilized living uses fossil fuel in one form or another. People heat their homes with it and acquire everything from synthetic fabrics to household appliances (plastic doesn’t grow on trees).
While those prone to the ideological disease of leftism still fancy an idealistic world of yesteryear, free of synthetic anything and idyllic in communal charm, the reality is that energy production from burning wood or dung is an inferior method of advancing civilization. I won’t even begin to ponder the nonsense of tilting at windmills or car batteries which have their own problems, all swept neatly under the bumper-sticker vision.
The point here isn’t to champion the cause of guys in ties under the heat of Democrat persecution and media lies but to simply point out the underlying truth in a controversy of our time — civilized and advanced societies require energy to function. If Klaus Schwab and the Davos crowd aren’t calling the shots, the cost of living in the modern world is based on the result of consumer choices and the availability of products to meet those choices — deal with it.
