Jim Franklin,
With all due respect, please allow me to respond to my friend Dick Daley. Then, like George, I too will bow out.
RJ Daley,
You say to me "You are using sophistry (what is new?) Yes, stamps have only gone up...they are a license or permit to use a government service, they are not a commodity that floats with supply and demand. The price of BS seems rather constant in your market place, though...".
My friend, debating with you is as easy as shooting decoys in a bathtub. You prove my points over and over.
Rather than counter my argument with reason, you try to diminish me by calling me a sophist. You should at least first invest in learning what sophistry is (subtly deceptive reasoning or argumentation) before charging one with it. Let me tell you, there is nothing subtle about my reasoning and I have absolutely no need to be deceptive.
When you say "they are not a commodity that floats with supply and demand" referring to stamps as being different than oil, you are acknowledging that oil is a commodity whose price is largely governed by the laws of supply and demand. A secondary point might be that perhaps you don't really understand the terminology you're using; i.e. the reason first class delivery service in not commoditized is because of the government monopoly that protects its Postal Service from competition, making it somewhat immune to the laws of supply and demand.
Now, you attacked me because I posited that BIG GOVERNMENT (and yes, just like nearly every one of our founding fathers, I think it is a fearsome and necessarily corrupt force), by greatly restricting the domestic SUPPLY of oil, gas, coal, and nuclear energy for two decades has put us in our current painful position. Perhaps you gain greater psychological satisfaction by making BIG OIL the boogieman. By the way, that boat has long sailed- the Dems are now blaming one of the other horsemen of the apocalypse- the greedy speculators and hedge fund managers of Wall Street. Talk about unadulterated BS from the socialist market place of ideas! And who is the sophist?
And let's not forget about that other side of the equation you inadvertently referred to. Do you think that China and India taking hundreds of millions of people out of poverty into relative prosperity may be having an impact on DEMAND? What do you think happens when you add a few hundred thousand cars annually in a couple of countries? Might adding millions of jobs and hundreds of thousands of cars be driving up the demand for oil, gas, and other energy sources? You may wish to peruse any introductory book into economics, but when the demand goes up, absent a fundamental shift in supply, lo and behold, the price goes up!
But no, you rather believe that a president you despise or a few "fat cat" BIG OIL CEOs controlling less than 5% of the oil can get up one morning and say, "hey let's triple the price of crude and see what mayhem we can cause". I am sure the oil boys look forward to being called up in front of congress to be pilloried by our honorable public servants just in time for the evening news cycle. You may be able to live with the cognitive dissonance that's required for this level of thinking, but, at least, it might be appropriate to first look in the mirror before charging me with deceit.
There is one other thing I find rather curious about your reasoning. You seem to think that BIG OIL has an obligation of some type, ethical or maybe even legal, to supply as much gasoline as the consumer might like at a lower price. If they run the operation to maximize profits- e.g. shutting down or disposing of a refinery for any of a number of valid business reasons- that somehow this is inappropriate or illegal.
Let me ask you, when you and your cohorts negotiated union contracts and withheld labor in order to drive up its price, was that somehow appropriate, ethical, legal, etc.? Certainly you would never argue that the supply of critical public services is any less important than the supply of gasoline? I mean, I can always ride a bike to the grocery store or even to the golf course if gasoline is too damned expensive. But if someone is breaking into my car or my apartment is on fire, whom do I call if there is a bout of the blue flu going around? The same powerful unions make sure that cities and communities can't contract with potential private providers of police and fire protection services. So, the issue really isn't one of curtailing supply, but of who is doing the curtailing.
Lastly, you say "For what it is worth, your tactics are becoming boring and predictable to tag on Al Gore in the same issue and philosophy with Hugo Chavez and place Obama, Reid and Pelosi in the same bunker as Hugo or Fidel, fluffing up his so called lie. That is basically a version of "swiftboating". Did you hear about it, the public is getting on to and tired of that crap."
You mean the swiftboat vets who gave first hand testimony were lying? I was under the impression that someone offered $1 Million to anyone who could convincingly refute the primary charges, and that to date no one has stepped up. Must be another of those urban myths propagated by the raving mad Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.
I do believe that the Dems mentioned (and I could add a half dozen others like Conyers and Shummer) are much more comfortable with the socialists/commies I noted than with most Americans. As much as you are sick and tired of "that crap", I suspect that more are tired of the unadultarated variety you like to fling about. The last popularity poll I saw for the current Democrat congress has them well below your hated president.
I know, you can't wait for the November election so that I and my kind get our comeuppance. Believe me, my friend, it will have a comparatively lower impact on me than it will for the poor saps who are buying into the false hope of change by going to the same time proven failed policies of BIG GOVERNMENT tax and spend.
Dan King,
During a case study (Chiquita bananas) in a seminar in international business years ago, I playfully suggested that a multinational corporation, when confronted with a law in another country that materially affects its operation there, should consider the benefits and costs of complying with that law. We had a few students from the Master of Public Administration program taking that course and their reaction was priceless. They were, of course, aghast. These folks could talk endlessly about programs to promote social justice, yet they had the hardest time with simple financial concepts as the time value of money. They thought a cost/benefit analysis was a decision tree of dos and don'ts with no quantitative or statistical considerations!
I do think that corporations have certain institutional morals and ethics that they try to follow. These are derived more or less directly from the board of directors, officers, shareholders, consumers, and where they do business. Making money is paramount, but there are other important considerations as well. And we should all be careful about who we are calling greedy and unethical. I think that over 50% of Americans own shares of corporations. When we point that finger at BIG OIL, we could literally be pointing it at ourselves!