Speaking of hate crimes

How about the crime of price gouging by oil companies? Maybe we should burn Adam Smith in effigy, and whoever that Invisible Hand belongs to.

The fact that so many politicians, including many who should know better, felt a need to haul a bunch of oil company execs into the dock and treat them like criminals makes me wonder why we bother with representative democracy. I thought the idea was to temper the excesses of mob psychology.

Funny that the thing that triggered Bush's low poll numbers seems to have been the high gas prices following the hurricanes. As though he was supposed to wave a wand and evade the laws of supply and demand.

I don't really buy into all this energy independence talk. What we really suffer from is the fact that a lot of nations are able to produce their oil more cheaply that we can produce our own and sell it to us at lower prices. Another oil embargo would cause gas and heating bills to shoot up, but the energy would still be available. If we'd had price freezing laws in effect after Katrina and Rita, the prices would have stayed the same, but you couldn't buy it anywhere.

You want conservation? Let the prices go up. we can do that and give poor people vouchers. That's Krauthammer's point.

You want to stop global warming? Put a tax on CO2 emissions by cars, power plants, etc. The Kyoto Treaty was based on central planning, when a market-based approach would have been much more effective with less of an increase in bureaucracy.

You could even give everybody a tax credit for what they paid in higher prices, and it probably would still accomplish the goal in either case.

The reason we haven't done either one should be obvious, if you watch these "gouging" hearings.