Don't Do It, Mr. President

don't blame the oil companies

We all know that at the street level there are a lot of ordinary people that think that rising prices equals “price gouging” by “them.”

But we advanced people, we educated people, know tha prices are determined by the market, by the net result of buyers and sellers buying and selling.

So when President Biden issues the following message to oil companies:

“Do not, let me repeat, do not use this as an excuse to raise gasoline prices or gouge the American people,” Biden said at the start of a conference on hunger in America.

you can’t help but lose a bit of faith in the political process. Oh, by the way, President Biden has drawn down the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve from 636 million barrels in December 2020 to 468 million barrels at the end of August 2022. What could go wrong if a hurricane comes along and shuts down crude oil production?

See, the way I look at it, one of the central jobs of a wise and worthy ruling class is not to rile up the kids on the street; not to suggest that ordinary market prices are fixed — exept when fixed by the government; not to rile up wage earners to believe that their pay is unjustly low, or that prices are unjustly high.

Golly Gee Willikins. If oil prices are high, it couldn’t be because the Biden administration has pretty well shut down oil leases, has shut down oil pipeline construction, has implemented all kinds of administrative regulations to transition the economy away from cheap fossil fuels? Could it?

But I get it. Right now, I imagine, the internal polls are telling the Biden administration that it is heading for a midterm disaster. That’s why the Bidenoids have stepped up withdrawals from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve: to make gas prices dip a couple months before the midterms. That’s why the Bidenoids have floated a plan to forgive college student loans. Because white women graduates with useless degrees tend to vote for Democrats if you can get them out to the polls.

Yeah. I get it. But I don’t like it. Because any society needs political leaders that keep the political urge to fight the enemy — any enemy — down to a dull roar. Human males naturally like to resort to fisticuffs after a couple of brewskies. The point of politics is to keep the natural hatred of the “other” damped down so that politics doesn’t flare up into civil war.

When political leaders like President Biden rail at the oil companies it Makes Things Worse.

And I am sure that President Biden and his advisors know this. But, more important than the peace of the nation, to them, is the political power that threatens to slip out of their grasp, unless they act now by calling Trump voters fascists and oil companies price gougers.

It’s what low-life politicans do of a weekday morning.