KentForLiberty pages

Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Feds deserve blame for gas prices

Feds deserve blame for gas prices

(My Clovis News Journal column for April 6, 2012)

Let me take a wild-eyed guess: You are unhappy about the rising price of gasoline. I'll make another guess: You are blaming the wrong people.

Most people place the blame on oil companies and ignore the reality. Without government interference, prices would be much lower than they are. How much lower? We will never know until we make separation of business and state an enforced reality.

People get upset over claims that BigOilCo pays no taxes. By this I assume they mean corporate income taxes or some-such thing. The truth is that no company ever pays any taxes; their customers do. If an oil company "pays" taxes, the extra expense will be added to the cost of production and you will pay all those taxes at the pump and when you buy your food, water, clothes, electricity, and everything else. The added expense has to be passed along or the company will cease to be. That's just basic economics, which means it is beyond the thinking capacity of government.

At each step of the way, before the gasoline gets in your tank, taxes are rolled in as a cost of doing business. This is in addition to the regulations of every sort which also increase the price. All that red tape is expensive and you ultimately pay for it.

Then governments stick it to you, personally, at the point of sale by adding even more taxes on top of everything else they have collected so far.

Then there are also the problems that official and covert government intervention causes in the countries where much of the oil is being produced. Meddling, threatening, and otherwise making enemies of those who should be trading partners; not subjects of the growing Empire, being told how to run their own countries.

On top of all this is the protection of the fuel monopoly. Nothing so far discovered works as well as petroleum for fueling vehicles. Nothing. And, yes, I have owned an electric car. Stifling innovation, through more regulations and red tape, in the development of new technology that might make internal combustion obsolete, or actually efficient, prevents real solutions from being found and implemented.

The final 800-pound gorilla in the room is the misnamed phenomenon of "Inflation". Inflation is not the price of gasoline rising; it is the value of a dollar falling. An ounce of silver still buys about the same amount of gasoline it did back when the US dollar was backed by by something of value and our "silver" coins were really silver. The counterfeiting operation at the Federal Reserve has stolen the value of your labor by replacing your money with empty promises. It takes more of these counterfeit "dollars" to buy a gallon of fuel.

Let's blame the real bad guys, not their other victims.


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The sum of my experiences...


I am a sum of my past.

Throughout my life I have gone through phases, and although sometimes those phases may seem, to an observer, to have ended, they have all left their mark. They have each been incorporated into the me that now exists.

I was thinking about this as I was out throwing my tomahawk. I have not been to a mountainman rendezvous in several years. I don't wear buckskin clothes exclusively anymore. I don't even wear my mountainman hat very often. Yet the skills and experiences from that part of my life are just as strong in me and just as important a part as they ever were. And, often, still just as useful. They changed the way I look at the world completely and I can never go back. Someday, I may even get back into the lifestyle again.

Every other phase I have lived has left the same indelible mark on my life. They have made me who I am. Each time was another case of "taking the red pill".

If I ever decide to stop speaking out- educating?- about liberty I expect the same results. The things I have learned by digesting my own thoughts, and the thoughts I have had shared with me by others, mean I can never go back to the way I was before. And for that, I'm glad.


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