Dems 'Oil' Wet About Gas Prices ( Great read! )

WASHINGTON -- Have you noticed that ever since the Democrats took control of Congress, oil and gas prices have been going through the roof?

The Dems won control of the House and Senate last year in part on the notion that sinking billions of taxpayer dollars into corn-based ethanol would combat global warming; itself a dubious superstition that some scientists say is part of the Earth's natural environmental changes over many eons.

Among the predictable results: increased gas prices because of higher refinery costs to blend ethanol into petroleum-based fuel, and higher grain and food prices because the government-induced demand for corn drove up agricultural prices on the commodities market. This is known as the law of unintended consequences, and it seems to be popping up with just about everything the Democratic-run Congress has been passing lately.

The Democrats also ran against the oil companies, charging them with collusion to drive up the price of oil and gas, attacking their rising profits and high salaries, and proposing that the answer to all this was to smack Exxon-Mobil and their partners in crime with an "excess profits" tax so that Congress can spend that money on other things -- like ethanol subsidies.

Every so often, to demonstrate their concern about higher gas prices, Congress calls oil executives up to Capitol Hill to explain why the numbers keep rising. Lawmakers angrily wag their fingers at the cornered businessmen, threatening to uncover their alleged skullduggery. The executives in turn patiently explain how oil prices rise and fall in global trading and are largely driven by the laws of supply and demand. The hearings end and not much comes of it except some newspaper headlines.

An abysmal level of ignorance about all this pervades Congress, a cloud of cluelessness breathtaking to behold. Apparently these lawmakers skipped Economics 101 or were never taught about the principles of supply and demand. Here's what Democratic Sen. Herb Kohl of Wisconsin told senior oil company executives at a recent Judiciary Committee hearing: "People don't get it. Demand is not crazy. Why are prices going crazy?"

I guess Kohl must have missed all the stories about skyrocketing global demand for oil. One executive explained that world demand was certainly crazy, driven by fast-growth economies like China and India. Oil and gas inventories have barely kept pace with that demand, but the gap between supply and demand has grown tighter, and that drives up prices in global commodities markets.

Kohl seemed unconvinced by this explanation because it did not fit in with his party's belief that oil executives are crooks who charge excessively and draw lavish paychecks. Indeed, the executives were actually asked how much they were paid, as if this had anything to do with production and refinery capacity, inventories and oil exploration.

"Where is the corporate conscience?" Sen. Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, asked the executives at one point in the hearing. Such is the demagoguery that now permeates congressional inquiry.

But Durbin faced some uncomfortable cross-examination that evening when he was challenged by CNN news anchor Campbell Brown who wanted to know what he and the Democrats were doing about rising oil and gas prices. Durbin responded by attacking President Bush, suggesting that the answer lay in a change in administrations, but he did not utter a single plausible solution to the problem.

Brown tried again, reminding him that Democrats said they were going to deal with this issue, and asked, "What are you proposing to do to bring down gas prices?" Again Durbin dodged the question, saying instead that the answer was to elect more Democrats to Congress in November. That ended the interview.

Perhaps the reason Durbin's responses were so evasive has to do the fact that Democrats don't have answers that make any sense. Ethanol is now a big political problem for the Democrats and is seen as one of the chief causes of higher food prices. Fatter farm subsidies, which Democrats stuffed into last week's farm bill, is the other, pushing up the price of grains, milk, bread, beef and poultry. Democrats talked of expanding ethanol subsidies last year, expanding production into other environmentally friendly resources such as witch grass and wood chips. Two things Democrats did not run on last year: boosting oil and natural gas exploration here at home and building more refineries.

"The basic story that has brought oil from $20 to $130 is that world demand is growing robustly when world supply is not," says Jeffrey Rubin, chief economist of CIBC World Markets.

"It all comes down to supply and demand," says oil magnate T. Boone Pickens who knows a thing or two about both.

That's the problem and the solution in a nutshell. But it's not the answer Democrats like Kohl and Durbin want to hear because in an election year, fanatic finger-pointing sells better.

So they continue to point the finger of blame at oil-company executives, commodity traders, and gas-guzzling SUVs, and promote wood chips, witch grasses and windmills as the answer to all our energy needs.

Read this and I think you will agree the oil industry has already been Nationalized in the US;

It was common in those days, as it is in ours, to identify the Communists as leftist and the Nazis as rightists, as if they stood on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. But Mises knew differently. They both sported the same ideological pedigree of socialism. “The German and Russian systems of socialism have in common the fact that the government has full control of the means of production. It decides what shall be produced and how. It allots to each individual a share of consumer’s goods for his consumption.”

The difference between the systems, wrote Mises, is that the German pattern “maintains private ownership of the means of production and keeps the appearance of ordinary prices, wages, and markets.” But in fact the government directs production decisions, curbs entrepreneurship and the labor market, and determines wages and interest rates by central authority. “Market exchange,” says Mises, “is only a sham.”

Mises’s account is confirmed by a remarkable book that appeared in 1939, published by Vanguard Press in New York City (and unfortunately out of print today). It is The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism by Guenter Reimann, then a 35-year old German writer. Through contacts with German business owners, Reimann documented how the “monster machine” of the Nazis crushed the autonomy of the private sector through onerous regulations, harsh inspections, and the threat of confiscatory fines for petty offenses.

“Industrialists were visited by state auditors who had strict orders to examine the balance sheets and all bookkeeping entries of the company or individual businessman for the preceding two, three or more years until some error or false entry was found,” explains Reimann. “The slightest formal mistake was punished with tremendous penalties. A fine of millions of marks was imposed for a single bookkeeping error.”

Reimann quotes from a businessman’s letter: “You have no idea how far state control goes and how much power the Nazi representatives have over our work. The worst of it is that they are so ignorant. These Nazi radicals think of nothing except ‘distributing the wealth.’ Some businessmen have even started studying Marxist theories, so that they will have a better understanding of the present economic system.

“While state representatives are busily engaged in investigating and interfering, our agents and salesmen are handicapped because they never know whether or not a sale at a higher price will mean denunciation as a ‘profiteer’ or ‘saboteur,’ followed by a prison sentence. You cannot imagine how taxation has increased. Yet everyone is afraid to complain. Everywhere there is a growing undercurrent of bitterness. Everyone has his doubts about the system, unless he is very young, very stupid, or is bound to it by the privileges he enjoys.

“There are terrible times coming. If only I had succeeded in smuggling out $10,000 or even $5,000, I would leave Germany with my family. Business friends of mine are convinced that it will be the turn of the ‘white Jews’ (which means us, Aryan businessmen) after the Jews have been expropriated. The difference between this and the Russian system is much less than you think, despite the fact that we are still independent businessmen.”

As Mises says, “independent” only in a decorous sense. Under fascism, explains this businessman, the capitalist “must be servile to the representatives of the state” and “must not insist on rights, and must not behave as if his private property rights were still sacred.” It’s the businessman, characteristically independent, who is “most likely to get into trouble with the Gestapo for having grumbled incautiously.”

“Of all businessmen, the small shopkeeper is the one most under control and most at the mercy of the party,” recounts Reimann. “The party man, whose good will he must have, does not live in faraway Berlin; he lives right next door or right around the corner. This local Hitler gets a report every day on what is discussed in Herr Schultz’s bakery and Herr Schmidt’s butcher shop. He would regard these men as ‘enemies of the state’ if they complained too much. That would mean, at the very least, the cutting of their quota of scarce and hence highly desirable goods, and it might mean the loss of their business licenses. Small shopkeepers and artisans are not to grumble.”

“Officials, trained only to obey orders, have neither the desire, the equipment, nor the vision to modify rules to suit individual situations,” Reimann explains. “The state bureaucrats, therefore, apply these laws rigidly and mechanically, without regard for the vital interests of essential parts of the national economy. Their only incentive to modify the letter of the law is in bribes from businessmen, who for their part use bribery as their only means of obtaining relief from a rigidity which they find crippling.”

Says another businessman: “Each business move has become very complicated and is full of legal traps which the average businessman cannot determine because there are so many new decrees. All of us in business are constantly in fear of being penalized for the violation of some decree or law.”

Business owners, explains another entrepreneur, cannot exist without a “collaborator,” i.e., a “lawyer” with good contacts in the Nazi bureaucracy, one who “knows exactly how far you can circumvent the law.” Nazi officials, explains Reimann, “obtain money for themselves by merely taking it from capitalists who have funds available with which to purchase influence and protection,” paying for their protection “as did the helpless peasants of feudal days.”

“It has gotten to the point where I cannot talk even in my own factory,” laments a factory owner. “Accidentally, one of the workers overheard me grumbling about some new bureaucratic regulation and he immediately denounced me to the party and the Labor Front office.”

Reports another factory owner: “The greater part of the week I don’t see my factory at all. All this time I spend in visiting dozens of government commissions and offices in order to get raw materials I need. Then there are various tax problems to settle and I must have continual conferences and negotiations with the Price Commission. It sometimes seems as if I do nothing but that, and everywhere I go there are more leaders, party secretaries, and commissars to see.”

In this totalitarian paradigm, a businessman, declares a Nazi decree, “practices his functions primarily as a representative of the State, only secondarily for his own sake.” Complain, warns a Nazi directive, and “we shall take away the freedom still left you.”

In 1933, six years before Reimann’s book, Victor Klemperer, a Jewish academic in Dresden, made the following entry in his diary on February 21: “It is a disgrace that gets worse with every day that passes. And there’s not a sound from anyone. Everyone’s keeping his head down.”

It is impossible to escape the parallels between Guenter Reimann’s account of doing business under the Nazis and the “compassionate,” “responsible,” and regulated “capitalism” of today’s U.S. economy today. At least the German government was frank enough to give the right name to its system of economic control.

Here is the link for this article:

http://mises.org/story/47

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