“If we do not halt this steady process of building commissions and regulatory bodies and special legislation like huge inverted pyramids … we shall soon be spending many billions of dollars more.”
That great and spot-on quote in a March 2, 1930, radio address from an unlikely orator – Franklin D. Roosevelt. Unlikely, of course, because FDR, once president, became the grand poohbah of building commissions, regulatory bodies and special legislation.
Critics of that characterization will argue that FDR’s actions “saved” the nation from The Great Depression. Never mind, economists remind, that FDR’s interventions extended the depth and length of the Depression.
That history lesson is most applicable to the mess contemporary bureaucrats have created in Allegheny County with gasoline formulations, supplies and prices.
Per-gallon prices already are approaching $3.10, 35 cents or more higher per gallon than those in neighboring West Virginia and Ohio. By one accounting, they could end up being 65 cents to 85 cents higher – and 30 to 50 cents more expensive than neighboring Pennsylvania counties – if bureaucrats don’t get their acts together.
Simply put, bureaucrats dragged their feet acting on Allegheny County’s application to stop the mandated use of “reformulated” gasoline during the summer months. And that has had a domino effect in the marketplace.
With no clear guidance, refineries have had to reserve some capacity to make reformulated gasoline, scheduled to begin shipping the first of May for use beginning in June. But because there is less and less demand for it (because of evolving clean air regulations) fewer and fewer markets require it.
Thus, refining it has become more expensive. And its supply to Allegheny County – the only place in the three-state region that still, technically, requires it, could be truncated.
Higher summer driving demand, coupled with reduced foreign output, could produce a triple whammy – shortages, skyrocketing prices and leave service stations with a severe case of The Bureaucrats Killed My Business Disease. But in Allegheny County only.
Gasoline would be markedly cheaper in surrounding counties and in the Mountain and Buckeye states.
And one can only wonder how the recent actions of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission to deny a request to partially reverse the pipeline flow of product from East Coast producers – to “protect” one refiner at not only the expense of consumers and, in reality, a government-sanctioned subsidy to another – has affected the local base price that has been escalating steadily.
What intervention might we expect from government next? Perhaps attempting to bar Allegheny County residents from purchasing gasoline elsewhere to “protect” local stations?
Ah, yes, as a certain scrivener is wont to remind, government interventionism only begets more government intervention — to cover up the lie of each “last” government intervention.
Wrote one Thomas Jefferson in 1824:
“I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living off the labor of the industrious.”
As the government bureaucracy lording over gasoline in Allegheny County sadly illustrates.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
