Your problem is that your mind works on a hinge. It must be either one or the other and cannot be a combination of things. The oil companies have no lack of money and no lack of political clout. If they really wanted to fix the problem they could have.
One of your problems is that you think that it is a bunch of dems and bureaucrats beating up on poor private industry who just want the shackles lifted on their business. That is so so wrong. Who do you think pays all the bills to keep K-street up and running. Answer - private industry because that is where the money is. If they lobby so heavily, how come we have so much regulation - answer - they like it that way because it cuts out competition. You think that so-called private enterprise wants to go out and find and exploit lots more oil. But why would they do that. If they were running profitable businesses when oil was $20 and $30 a barrel they must love it when oil is $137 a barrel. (That is an economic rent - i.e. free money - of $107 a barrel.) Why when you are making SO MUCH free money would you have any incentive to do anything to bring down the cost of oil by increasing supply.
When you can draw supply and demand curves for oil, show the effects of elasticity, effects of windfall profit taxes on those curves, effects of incentives for exploration and exploitation, then I will admit that you are starting to understand something.
Right now, however, you are just spewing idiotic ideology that shows no understanding of how this business or any business actually works.
AndyJackson: “Your problem is that your mind works on a hinge.”
Ah, so you know how my mind works as well as being a master of all things economic?
Of course you’re right about Washington. That’s why I said we need less of it, not more. Obviously big business does as you wrote. The farm industry is a classic case. I bet most people would end farm subsidies in an instant if they knew what was going on, but most people aren’t running the country. We are led by a relatively small number of elites. Sure, occasionally someone new breaks into the party, but they are quickly marginalized or corrupted.
Like you wrote, we hardly have a free market. We are well past that. When I propose a free market and less government, I’m not asking for anarchy. I’m asking for an end to corporate welfare and the byzantine system of rules and regulations.
What you seemed to be proposing in your initial email was more government intervention and control. Yet, you yourself wrote how big oil essentially controls the government. How, therefore, do you see government solving this problem?