perfidy

Anyone with pretense to staying current on the news of the day is going to trip over a lot of tripe, and most tripe isn't worth commentary.

Important ideas & issues, discussed among adults? Sure, I'll opine on those, whether I agree or not with the idea's originator. And sometimes, I'll even become convinced I was wrong. Goofy ideas? Not generally worth the bother of comment, because they're spun out with enough centrifugal force that nothing I can say or do will change the spin for those who encounter the idea after me.

However, I was reminded, via an opinion piece in the Friday Boston Globe, that there's a level of goofy that is worth, nay, demands commentary, even if only for my own sanity.

In the piece, one Derrick Z. Jackson of the Globe fulminates about the looting that's the result of Hurricane Katrina. I was initially prepared to ignore it, because we've seen the "looters", good and bad, in many repeats on the news over the past week, and I didn't care to listen to yet another complaint about how so many African Americans, yet so few persons of pallor, had been shown treating plasma TVs and Nike shoes as base necessities of life. Feh. They'll sort it out amongst themselves, I figure, and no amount of concern on my part will change it. I'd much prefer that time be spent on medicating, housing, clothing, and feeding the victims.

But then I read on, and he's not talking about the good, the bad, and the ugly of New Orleans.

PRESIDENT BUSH yesterday told ABC-TV, ''there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this, whether it be looting or price-gouging at the gasoline pump or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud."

Zero tolerance is meaningless when the White House lets the biggest looters of Hurricane Katrina walk off with billions of dollars.

He's talking about the oil companies, those rotten bastards!

In the midst of this charity, big oil looted the nation. The pumps instantly shot past $3 a gallon, with $4 a gallon well in sight.

That couldn't have had anything to do with the shutdown of roughly 25% of our national refining capacity, or the price of oil, world-wide, rising to $70/barrel, because both of those would just be crazy-talk. So he must have a point, right?

If Bush really meant what he said, he would call for a freeze or cap on gasoline prices, especially in the regions affected most dramatically by Katrina. He would challenge big oil to come up with a much more meaningful contribution to relief efforts.

Insurance companies are expecting up to $25 billion in claims from Katrina. For ExxonMobil, which is headed to $30 billion in profits, to jack up prices at the pump and then only throw $2 million at relief efforts is unconscionable.

Wait a minute, Derrick Z. - I just came back to my senses, and there's a typo in your story. You meant "Carter" where you said "Bush", right? I'm a grizzled-enough veteran of life to remember those days, and they sucked like a Hoover, because the economy did just what economies do when confronted with the bleatings of economic idiots such as yourself who think that prices can be arbitrarily controlled without unintended consequences. Of course they can't, any more than supply can be changed arbitrarily without affecting price.

Price controls never, ever work in the markets for scarce commodities. Ever. And if the government makes it illegal to charge market prices in a market where the non-vertically-integrated producers have only ephemeral control of their raw material costs, then the oil will just go to other markets, such as China, where price is distorted in a complementary manner - gasoline prices are subsidized there, and the people are therefore insensitive to the raw material cost, consuming oil as fast as they can buy the machines required to burn it. Because that's what markets do when you fiddle with them. The act poorly.

Oh, and the bit about ExxonMobil heading for $30 billion in profit this year while the insurance industry is looking at a $25 billion payout for Katrina? Just a coincidence, I'm sure, slipping in that bit about insurance companies, who presumably aren't gouging us on gasoline costs and otherwise have nothing to do with his storyline. But if I didn't know better, Che, I'd think you were sneakily advocating that the oil companies should pay the costs of the damage, rather than those who were actually paid to assume the risk. Word games are funny that way.

My sincere hope is that anyone with at least a high-school quality understanding of basic economics will roundly ignore the maunderings of Mr. Jackson and those in his circle of illiteracy. The alternative is oil shortages and prices that don't come back to earth when market forces say that they should.

And, for the record, for the first time in my personal experience, I paid more than $3.00/gallon for gas on the way home from the office today. My first $50 fill-up in anything smaller than an 18-wheeler, in fact. It pained me at some level, but I understood, and while the ladies at the Diamond Shamrock fell all over themselves trying to explain to me that they weren't just boning me on behalf of their evil corporate masters, I politely asked them to stuff a sock in it, as I already knew that.

Unlike Derrick Z. Jackson, you see, I don't attempt to reshape the observable facts to justify my feelings of victimhood.