Saturday, April 29, 2006

Creeping socialism for thee, but not for me.

Creeping socialism always seems to follow the pattern of a successful society's non-productive sector promoting a growing ignorance of economics. While ‘our betters’ in the MSM are too well educated to let common sense get in the way, they go wild over the 7 percent Exxon makes. Not surprisingly there is no outcry over the 19.5 percent margin of profit on a newspaper. We find no hew-and-cry for investigation into the secretive and large scale effort to create a public addiction to those delusion inducing opinion-makers.
All we find is the usual bitching and moaning about others' success. It's as hypocritical as we've said here earlier about Microsoft and Apple's only "crimes": not being European "champions."

But I digress. Getting back to oil - it seems to become a commodity that's magically different than others when the left is angry and needs some press. The old routine where they feign a concern for people must feel pretty good to those idiots who need others to be miserable in order to nobly pity them.

Rich Tucker highlights the finer points of this ridiculous routine the left keeps using:
It’s critical to be aware of memes, because these days we’re all falling under the sway of a powerful one -- a meme that insists gasoline prices are too high because oil companies are gauging us. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi nicely encapsulated this. “We have two oilmen in the White House. $3-a-gallon gasoline is no mistake. It’s a logical follow-up,” she told reporters.

But oil prices aren’t set by the White House. They’re governed by the laws of supply and demand. Worldwide demand for oil is surging, especially in developing nations such as India and China. In fact, most of “big oil’s” profits come from overseas; three-quarters of ExxonMobil’s $8.4 billion first-quarter profit was earned abroad.

Lawmakers won’t tell you this, but taxes are a big reason gasoline is so expensive. The Energy Department says that in 2004, 23 percent of the price of a gallon of gas was taxes, while 18 percent was for refining costs and company profits.

And oh, by the way, Exxon’s “excessive” earnings were 7 percent higher in the first quarter -- exactly the same percentage growth as the 7 percent announced by media company E.W. Scripps Co. And former Los Angeles Times Editor John Carroll recently noted that the average newspaper profit margin remains 19.5 percent.
Indeed, I really would like to see if a nagging cabal of Nancy Pelosi types DOES succeed in artificially suppressing the price of energy when it’s supply is low, and it’s cost is HALF of the real value that it was 30 years ago. It takes the piss out of the other leftist lie that (supply and demand be damned,) energy should cost more.

No doubt they will propose a social solution: dispense cheaper fuel to the least economically successful who are going to be the least productive with it... We’ve seen this before. That creeping “redistributionism” cum folk-Marxism brings the stagnation that impacts the disadvantaged the most.
But folk Marxism is not limited by this economic classification scheme. All sorts of other issues are viewed through the lens of oppressors and oppressed...

Under folk Marxism, the oppressed class has inherent moral superiority to the oppressor class ... Class membership trumps individual character in determining moral standing ... It should be no surprise that this belief has failed to improve the lot of those regarded as "oppressed." It inverts Martin Luther King's call to judge people by the content of their character.
SO – according to this morally repugnant elite, there should be no open market for anything except the social classification that is the most irrationally revered. As ever, prejudice and racism has never benefited anyone, except for those selling the rest of us on it.

Alas if the Lamp of Liberty can illuminate in Arabic, why would the likes of the New York Times shun the same discussion of it in English?

The only way to know is to follow the money.

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