An Experiment in Scotch

It’s always worth read­ing what Stein has to say on top­ics such as these. As is the often the case in mat­ters such as these, it’s always more com­fort­able to go after an easy tar­get espe­cially if that easy tar­get is a big, rich oil company. Politi­cians, in their con­stant search for the good sound­bite, look for these easy tar­gets, ignor­ing the under­ly­ing com­plex­ity because com­plex­ity is bad for their campaigns. How­ever, if you con­tinue to tar­get the wrong thing in these cases, you’ll even­tu­ally find out that the mar­ket has removed the easy tar­gets from the shoot­ing range.

Short ver­sion: Oil com­pa­nies have lit­tle to noth­ing to do with the prices of the oil and gas prod­ucts you consume. The mar­ket sets these prices inde­pen­dent of the oil com­pa­nies interests. Our Congress-critters ignore that at all our peril.