Monday, May 29, 2006

Apparently Lt. Pantano was acquitted

I don't know about you, but this is the first I've heard of Lt. Pantano's acquittal. Good news. Also, this article is a must read if you want an understated critique of Rep(rehensible) Murtha's recent attacks on the Marine Corps.

SRS

Monday, May 08, 2006

Fox guards henhouse against hens

Suggesting that oil companies need to be willing to profit less from gasoline so that Americans can have cheaper gas seems to me to be a lot like suggesting that a man with both his legs tied together would be able to crawl faster if he just cut his legs off. Why not cut the ropes off of his legs?

Yeah, it's pretty jealousy-provoking to see a company make record-breaking goo-gobs of profit while you're paying 40-50% more than you're used to for something you need. But the oil companies are making about a fourth or a fifth as much as the government each time you fill up. Then the government turns around and spends that money enforcing regulations that make it much more expensive to produce gasoline (and make the environment squeaky-clean, instead of just super-clean). So maybe we should think about cutting gasoline taxes, or eliminating some of the unnecessary environmental regulations. (Think all environmental regs are necessary? Remember Clinton at 11:59 PM the night before Bush's Inauguration Day ordering that instead of 10 parts in a gazillion of arsenic in our drinking water, we were going to spend billions of dollars to bring it down to one part in a gazillion, even though it takes about 10,000 parts/gazillion of arsenic/water to make anyone sick? Well, he did, and when Bush made the most obviously good decision in the history of decision-making by overturning it, everyone in the Marxist-Sympathizing Media pulled out their hair and screamed that he was poisoning our water - our children's water! It's the same thing with the gasoline additives. It's doubtful that a sparrow would ever get a bit phlegm from the "air pollution" that the cheaper-additive gasoline produces, let alone that it would turn every American city's sky to Shanghai beige, but the Robert Redford crowd nonetheless won't let us use the cheap stuff. Same crowd won't let us drill in the Alaskan tundra for oil and natural gas.)

Sorry about the long parenthesis. The point is, we could just start cutting the government interference in the economy, especially unnecessary environmental regulations. That would be like cutting off the ropes that bind the legs of the economy. Or we could just blindly lash out in vengeance against the oil companies, which would be like cutting off the legs of our economy.

SRS

P.S. Before you start putting up hate comments because of my "defense of the oil companies," let me just say that the oilers aren't the legs in my analogy. The legs represent market freedoms.
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