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To: theBuckwheat
[supply "won't be able to meet" demand] Indeed, it is just a vapid worry, as long as a free market is allowed to function. Even today, when you can have all the gasoline you want to buy at $3.00/gal, the industry could not meet the demand if government forced the price down to $1.00/gallon.

Yeah, I wondered about that too (won't the price just rise till they equalize?), but I interpreted that statement of his in an expansively charitable way - i.e., that he was just saying that the extrapolated demand curve will exceed the (known) supply curve... after all, the article says the same thing ("demand will exceed supply by 13 million barrels per day by 2030"), which makes equally little sense unless you interpret it like I had to.

31 posted on 07/23/2007 3:47:15 PM PDT by Dr. Frank fan
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To: Dr. Frank fan
>>
...that he was just saying that the extrapolated demand curve will exceed the (known) supply curve...
<<

These extrapolations always fail for three very good reasons:

1) They never take into account how humans will react;

2) They cannot take into account new inventions;

3) They are outside of the effects of unintended consequences like the economic catastrophe that resulted from government policy decisions prior to the Great Depression.

A simple analogy would be this: A person prone to such thinking must never, ever be allowed to sit on the flight deck of an airplane because he will extrapolate the climb-out after takeoff to be a sure sign the aircraft is headed for outer space, and during the final approach to land, the extrapolation of the flight path always ends up striking the ground at a fatal angle well short of the runway.

50 posted on 07/23/2007 6:23:31 PM PDT by theBuckwheat
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