Wonder about gas prices?


It's not the fault of the free market
Richard Rahn writes the truth.

The high price of oil is a direct consequence of artificial supply constraints imposed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and other countries, including the United States, and the incompetence and mismanagement found in most state-owned oil companies. OPEC is an international government cartel made up of Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Libya, Angola, Algeria, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela. These nations control about 77 percent of the world's known liquid crude oil reserves.

Most of these countries and other major oil producers that rely on mainly state-owned companies, such as Russia, have underinvested in exploration and development of new production facilities and mismanaged the ones they have. (If politicians understood the facts and were truthful, they would rant against "greedy" socialists rather than private oil companies.)

Venezuela, despite having perhaps the sixth-largest oil reserves in the world, has falling production because of the mismanagement by the Chavez government. Mexico also is suffering from falling oil production because the government refuses to allow private oil exploration and production companies, and the state-owned oil company, Pemex, is corrupt and incompetent. By contrast, the U.S. only has about 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, but produces little more than 8 percent of global production, largely because they are privately owned and managed.

Hugo Chavez constantly blames the United States for Venezuela's economy, yet as far as I can tell no American official has given him more than a passing glance.

Given a chance, the free market works better than anything else we have tried.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Wed - November 28, 2007 at 04:44 AM  Tag


 ◊  ◊   ◊  ◊ 

Random selections from NeoWayland's library


Pagan Vigil "Because LIBERTY demands more than just black or white"
© 2005 - 2009 All Rights Reserved