“Democrats are determined to take the lead and cripple the US oil industry permanently.”

Last night’s guest on the podcast has a new article out at Mises titled, “The Oil Follies.” In it, he discredits the efforts of our Congress to “fix” the current cost of oil and gasoline. One of my favorite quotes from the article is:

Anyone familiar with modern politics knows that Republicans and Democrats regularly vie with each other to see who can be more economically illiterate, but it seems that with this proposed legislation, Democrats are determined to take the lead and cripple the US oil industry permanently.

With all their socialist programs and ideas, how can you come to any other conclusion? As Anderson notes: “it seems that the political classes in this country have decided that supply and demand really don’t matter at all, and that all commodity prices are simply arbitrarily administered by people who are impervious to the desires of consumers.”

The rest of the article takes the failed bill apart, piece by piece, and shows how destructive it would have been to the American, regardless if you drive or take mass transit. For example, when it comes to Barack Obama’s “windfall profits tax” (which I wrote about here), Anderson says:

If executives are not investing many of their profits into exploration and new equipment, then it means that they do not have confidence in the future. This would not be because oil suddenly will be unprofitable, but rather because oil executives have no confidence in the political classes.

Indeed, the prospect of a huge tax on profits — a tax that would be levied specifically at one industry on top of other taxes the oil industry pays — means that if oil companies are successful at their endeavors, Congress will single them out for special punishment. Congress wants to do what dictators have always done: steal the property of people who cannot defend themselves against the encroachment of the state. Thus, by threatening to confiscate the oil profits, Congress is encouraging the industry not to invest in new capital and not to increase oil supplies.

This is no idle threat.

Great analysis on the left’s attempt to fix the mess they helped create. As usual, the government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.