What’s to be done when a public policy maker, seeking to expand his public policy making influence through a higher office, plays to the least common denominator in public intelligence by spreading economic ignorance like so much manure?
You take the high road, point out the errors of his ways and hope that you can eradicate his ignorance, even though it just might be what we’ll coin as “willful panderance.”
This public policy maker has taken to, on the stump, calling for the prosecution of oil company executives for high gasoline prices. Even though the office to which he aspires has no such prosecutory power, he promotes the action nonetheless.
According to Reason magazine, this public policy maker, in a commentary in a Pennsylvania newspaper, wrote thusly:
“It’s time we crack down on the big, price-gouging corporations that are making record profits while jacking up prices for all of us.”
Furthermore, he wrote that “Chevron, Exxon and Shell have seen their profits increase 200 percent since last year, but they’re still charging us sky-high prices for gas.”
That, this public official charged, is “deeply unpatriotic.”
But in regurgitating such “progressive” activists’ talking points, he merely confirms that likely “willful panderance.”
Reason’s Joe Lancaster offered this measured tutorial Monday last:
“It’s true that profits for oil companies are up significantly over the last year or so, as a direct result of higher prices at the pump. But higher prices stem not from a capricious desire to simply make more money … but as a direct response to supply and demand.
“After a year indoors and buoyed by COVID-19 stimulus money, consumers traveled more: In January, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said that global oil demand would exceed pre-COVID levels.
“At the same time, the oil supply has been constrained by multiple factors, including Russia’s war on Ukraine and the residual effects of the pandemic: Less than a year before the IEA’s demand prediction, it speculated that global oil markets ‘may never return to ‘normal,'” Lancaster attempts to educate the promotion-seeking public policy maker.
Government talk of putting oil companies out of business certainly hasn’t helped, we might add.
As “Professor” Lancaster’s level-headed, just-the-facts tutorial continues:
“In such a scenario, when demand is high and supply is low, one would expect prices to rise. When prices are higher, consumers are incentivized to ration their gas and make it last longer. If prices remained flat, gas stations would run out, leading to shortages like those seen in the 1970s.
“In fact, part of the problem then was the imposition of price controls to keep prices down, which only made the shortages worse.”
Of course, Lancaster reminds that “on an actual profitability rating, oil companies are not uniquely successful: The industry’s average profit margin in 2021 was a little over 8 percent, lower than the communications, pharmaceutical and technology sectors.”
“Each of the three biggest oil companies is expected to hit double-digit profit margins this year,” the Reason scholar notes, but all will be dwarfed by companies like Citigroup, Pfizer and Apple.
“And as The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell noted, presidents routinely call on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate anti-competitive practices among oil companies when prices rise; each time, the result is determined to be higher oil costs.”
It once was written that “truth is strong enough to overcome all human sophistries.” Yet, despite bedrock economic truths, the sophists continue to ply their trade of “willful panderance” to the growing ignorant masses in pursuit of more power.
We don’t advocate the prosecution of such dishonest public policy brokers. We do, however, advocate that such snake oil salesmen, no matter their stripes, not be given any sales.
