Someone should do something.....about the high price of water!

Conservatives believe in small government. Bill O'Reilly says that he is a conservative. Why is he advocating that the government/someone "do something" about "high oil/gas prices"? Kim du Toit has an interesting rant against said pundit, but, this is not an entry about ol' Bill. Kim puts out some interesting info about the oil industry as it really is, not how we want it to be. Besides, anybody that pays $1+ for 20 oz. of bottled tap water at the convenience store has no business complaining about high gas prices......

From Kim du Toit:

1.) Oil prices are high because of surging demand.
2.) Said surging demand is coming not from the jillions of new SUV owners in Suburbia, U.S.A., but from emerging industrial giant nations like China and India, who have no oil themselves, and who must therefore import ever-increasing amounts of oil in order to keep their industrialization growing.
3.) China and India’s industrialization is possible because of their cheap and abundant labor, and low quality control. In other words, they’re making products cheaply, and not altogether concerning themselves with the quality thereof.
4.) Said cheap ‘n nasty products are coming over to the United States, where people are buying them in huge quantities—eg. $2 screwdrivers at the hardware store, $3 T-shirts at Wal-Mart, $1 scissors at Dollar General and 25c plastic glasses at Big Lots!.
5.) So, to complete the economic Circle of Life (for the benefit of morons like O’Reilly), the same people who are being “gouged” by higher gasoline prices are also saving money on cheaper tools, clothing, housewares and so on.

It really is that simple. The only people who can’t understand this are also people who can’t understand simple concepts like “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”.

In other words, when your pet dies from eating tainted crap pet food which came from China and only cost 19c a can, it’s because the Chinese could only produce pet food that cheaply by ignoring quality controls in its manufacture and by using animal by-products which would cause a vulture to gag. So if more rigorous quality controls are going to be instituted on imported Chinese foodstuffs, then the prices thereof will rise, as surely as night follows day.

Adam Smith will not be denied.

If you think that Eeevil Oil is making obscene profits, why not buy stock in an oil company, and share in the wealth it’s creating? Here’s a quick study.

Exxon-Mobil [XOM]’s average weekly share price:

Last year: $67.00 per share
This year: $88.00. That’s a 31% increase.

Just so we’re clear on the concept, let’s compare that 31% increase to the all-grade average third-week price of gasoline:

Last year: $3.033/gal
This year: $3.092/gal : a 2% increase.

Taking inflation into account, that means that the price of gasoline hasn’t gone up at over last year. Someone explain to me how a zero price increase equates to “gouging”—yet in that same period, Exxon-Mobil’s share price grew by over 30%.

et’s also look at another reason why gas prices are “high”: refining capacity.

We could double oil imports into our storage bins, but it would just sit there, because (thanks to our “friends” in the Green industry), our refining capabilities have stayed essentially flat over the past couple of decades. (By the way, you may want to look more closely at the refining industry’s profits, if you want to talk about “profiting from scarcity”, but that’s a story for another time.)

And if we add to that bottleneck the insistence of Moonbat states like California that refining companies produce all the “boutique” formulations to satisfy their local Greens, which further exacerbates the bottleneck, it’s not hard to see why gasoline prices would remain stubbornly high—even without the needs of the emerging industrialized nations.

And I didn’t even mention the fact that the dollar fell against other major currencies over the same period—thus making all imports, including oil, yet more expensive.

I'll add to that. Now, on top of all the abvoe, add the idiotic notion of adding ethanol to the fuel. Ethanol that lowers gas mileage, adds to pollution, is more expensive, and raises the price of food across the board, internationally. But don't say that its just a pork program for corn growers....