At the risk of understatement, big government has a dismal track record of imposing higher costs on the private sector, both directly and indirectly.
Which is why this cartoon definitely belongs in my mock-government collection (along with this one and this one).
Simply stated, free markets produce efficiency and lower costs while government produces inefficiency and higher costs.
So it was particularly galling that President Biden is engaging in demagoguery against oil companies. Peter Baker and Clifford Krauss of the New York Times report on a letter that he sent to some of their CEOs.
President Biden chastised some of the largest oil companies for profiteering off surging energy prices and “worsening that pain” for consumers… With the average price of gas in the United States topping $5 a gallon for the first time, Mr. Biden pointed the finger at energy firms in a letter to seven top executives… “At a time of war, refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable,” Mr. Biden said in the letter.
The trade association for the oil industry got the chance to respond and noted that the federal government is hindering energy development.
Mike Sommers, president of the American Petroleum Institute, countered that the administration shared the blame for higher energy prices and called for approval of new drilling leases and approval of “critical energy infrastructure” like pipelines.
I’m sure the Biden Administration has not been helpful, but I want to make a bigger point.
If the President wants to know who “profiteers” from the energy industry, he should look in the mirror.
Courtesy of Wikipedia, here’s a chart of federal gas taxes over time.
But Uncle Sam is not the biggest profiteer.
Almost every state government grabs even more every time we fill up. Here’s a map from the Tax Foundation.
Let’s close by acknowledging that the official position of both the Democratic Party and the International Monetary Fund is that higher energy prices are a good thing.
P.S. From the archives, here’s some gallows humor about energy prices.
The cartoon aptly depicts Brazil’s Socialized Medicine. There is no private drugstore you can walk in and pay for a flu shot. Go far, take a filthy number card and sit for an hour among the sickly hoping the shot is not tap water–that was my Gresham’s Law lesson today.
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We no longer possess a representative government in the USA and that is why government grows in size and the private sector shrinks.
My big peeve concerning politics (anywhere on earth) is that so called political leaders throughout the world and in the USA including their bureaucrats (kings men and women) and their naive supporters who seemingly will forever support the same incumbents forever. The obvious current world wide objective is to retain the same people holding down powerful to insignificant positions within government (elected or bureaucratic) forever. That current objective is the exact opposite to what were our founding fathers’ original intentions as outlined in the Declaration of Independence and in our Constitution. Our ancestors escaped to America to rid themselves of Kings including the king’s men and women or other such situations, like potentates with their henchmen.
We were meant to have a representative government. Representative does not mean a lawyer representing you or whatever. A good example of “being representative” is like when you take a load of wheat off your farm to a grain elevator to sell. When the truck is unloaded with grain spilling out the rear end of the truck box the grain elevator attendant will “randomly” take samples of the spilling grain and immediately take the same combined sample to a sorting machine to where the weed seeds will be separated from wheat seeds. From this sample the elevator official will dock the percentage of weed seeds found in the sample as a percentage of the total load of grain. After the elevator employee docks (eliminates or subtracts) weeds seeds from the wheat grain (percentage) then the grain elevator officials pay the farmer.
Later anyone can purchase these same weed seeds to feed you tweety birds, cattle or etc. from the same grain elevator.
Being representative of the whole (elected Senator, Congressman, President, Governor etc. in 2020) are identical to those random samples of grain taken out of the truck load of wheat grain harvested off a particular 80 acres of land in 2020. That random sample of wheat with their weed seeds (used to measure dockage) would be true for only that time and place, never again to be representative of that same 80 acres of land!
Randomness is critical to being representative, what is/was true of being representative in one particular instance in time (random sample of grain taken off a specific 80 acres) will never ever again be “true” for that same and future harvest of grain or whatever resources taken off those same 80 acres.
Hardly ever will a politician or bureaucrat be continually representative of their current or future constituencies be it district, city, county, state or nation.. Politicians wishing to be re-elected forget that their constituents are quite similar to those random samples of wheat grain plus weed seeds (dockage) in which a grain elevator identified in 2020 as coming off a specific truck from a specific 80 acre plot of land. Most incumbent politicians would desire that the same percentage of voters would be the same voters voting the same way OR same dockage of weeds taken off the same truck coming off the same 80 acres of wheat for all future elections. Meanwhile, that same 80 acres of land that had previously been planted in wheat could easily have been transformed by being planted into corn in preceding years or could even had been through a more radical transformation of becoming a cow pasture with no resemblance to the past agricultural activities (2020’s wheat crop). Being a bureaucrat or an elected government official is an extremely time sensitive endeavor! Being in public service means this same person should be extremely aware of their constituents’ needs yet most of the time the very opposite is true. A politician should or must have been in the shoes of their constituents like not being in government employment for most of their life such as being a farmer, grain elevator employee, hotel magnate, banker, Eye Doc. or etc. Being a person who lived by his wits, in private enterprise, is of course impossible for most career bureaucrats and elected types, while at the same time these career government types are all completely unaware of the real world.
Currently, the concept of being a career government official (elected/re-elected politician or career bureaucrat) ends up to where most of their daily actions are often the very opposite of, or injurious to the very concept of being representative of their constituencies but rather to feather their own nest off from the hard work of people in private enterprise.
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