Debate on fixing gas prices

There's a debate going on on Helium about fixing gas prices. I wrote this response.

This question doesn't even make any sense. Market forces are natural laws. Government can't free people from them. All government can do is pervert them to the detriment of everybody.

Supply, demand, and prices are inexorably tied together. Prices are the signal that tell consumers how much to demand and tell producers how much to supply. If you artificially lower prices, consumers will buy more and producers will supply less. The inevitable result is shortages.

I doubt the person who wrote this article was around in the 70s, when Nixon and Carter tried just this approach. It's amazing how politicians let power go to their heads, and they think their power can overcome natural laws. I'm sure you can plenty of pictures of the gas lines we endured in the 70s. Do we really want to revisit price controls and windfall profits taxes after having experienced the 20% interest rates and inflation, gas lines, and stagflation of the 70s?

I hope not. You would have to be ignorant of both economics and history to support controlling gas prices.

Unfortunately, Helium has a character minimum, and my response is too short. Too bad. I understand the need for a minimum standard, but it sure wasn't necessary to knock down this stupid idea to fix gas prices.

I added this:

I understand the need for Helium to have some minimum character or word limit, but it sure wasn't necessary to knock down this horrible idea of fixing gas prices. I'll continue just to meet the requirement.

It's scary that Democrats are proposing the exact same policies that blew up on us in the 70s. Now I don't think for a minute that Democrats who have managed to get elected to Washington are ignorant of history or economics. Some of them may be blinded by ideology, but I think they're rare. I think those Democrats know their proposals for price fixing and windfall profits taxes will destroy our economy just like they did in the 70s. But they think voters are ignorant.

The scary part is they don't care about the consequences. Republicans don't care either. If they thought they could get re-elected by demagoguing oil companies and proposing price fixing and windfall profits taxes, Republicans would do the same thing. And that says a lot about us. We're fallen into the trap of allowing professional politicians, aristocrats as surely as those in King Henry's court, to rule us. They don't care about us. They don't care about the country. Like all aristocrats, all they care about is their own power.

But America was supposed to be different. America worked when it was different. We were never supposed to have an aristocracy - our representatives were supposed to be citizen-representatives, the best and the brightest drawn from the private sector to temporarily serve and sacrifice for the good of country, then return home to work in the same economy as their constituents. But when we allowed government to grow so big that our representatives no longer lived in their home districts or earned their living in the private sector, we created America's aristocracy.

A great thing about America is we don't need a revolution to remove them from power. We can vote them out of office. But we refuse. We re-elect incumbents 94% of the time. We elect Republicans and Democrats 100% of the time. And our Congress, by blocking drilling in the US, blocking nuclear, coal, and natural gas power plants, blocking new refineries, by subsidizing the oil companies and wasteful so-called alternative fuels, has created this energy crisis. And every other economic crisis in the US.

We have nobody to blame but ourselves for voting for these same 2 parties of aristocrats.