Dear John: You said in last week’s column, “Forget the excess-profits tax on oil companies. We should throw some speculators in jail.”
Please throw journalists like you in there, too. Don’t we jail criminals in this country? What is criminal about buying and selling a commodity for the purpose of making a profit?
If you tell me speculators can “game” the market and set prices, then I’ll really know you are clueless. You are doing a great harm in promoting this socialist, ignorant, anti-American perspective of markets. J.H.
Dear J.H.: Let’s get something straight. There is nothing “free market” about having the freedom to manipulate the markets.
So let’s take the case of the current oil market. No less an authority than the head of the American Petroleum Institute – over breakfast a few months back – expressed concern to me that Wall Street speculators had hijacked the price of oil and gasoline, which just happen to be in more than adequate supply.
In fact, there have been multi-year records in gasoline inventories.
The API head said a distinction had to be made between the price of a “paper barrel” of oil and the real price of a barrel. In other words, there was a difference between the price at which speculators swap oil and the price oil companies are buying it.
Should the oil companies give up profits? No, that would truly be un-capitalistic and un-American.
Should speculators be permitted to boost oil prices just so they can make a fast buck off the fear of consumers? No, they shouldn’t.
And if we can prove speculators are manipulating the price of oil – either through rumors or dicey trading – then they should be treated no differently than those who goof around with stocks.
Remember the Hunt Brothers’ manipulation of the silver market? What was so “American” about that.
“Please throw journalists like you in there, too,” you said, meaning jail. That sounds pretty damned fascist to me, especially for someone whose e-mail address is @capitalistpig.com.
This is an especially galling position since we just went through a period of corporate greed that left a big portion of our population a whole lot poorer. Was that capitalism, too?
But I’ll give you one thing: Journalists have not been doing their jobs on the oil issue. Take CNBC, for instance.
How many times is that poor excuse for journalism going to give T. Boone Pickens, the biggest bloodsucker of all oil men, time to espouse his view that there is virtually no limit to how high the price of oil can go.
Pickens profits from these comments. He is, to put it bluntly, a shill for the speculators.
Throw the folks at CNBC in jail for poor journalism? Nah! That’s why God invented a mute button and gave us a thousand channels. And God also gave me a toilet that flushes letters like yours.
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