Behind the crickets

Remember the fuss about "windfall profits" the oil companies were "making" back in the day under BushCo™? Seems as though the very same oil companies are now suffering from "windfall losses":

Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Europe's largest oil company, posted its first quarterly loss in 10 years following a record plunge in oil prices, and warned that industry conditions "remain challenging."

The fourth-quarter net loss was $2.81 billion, or $0.44 a share, compared with a profit of $8.47 billion, or $1.36, a year earlier, The Hague-based Shell said today in a statement. Revenue fell 24 percent to $81.07 billion.

Oddly no word from the usual suspects who pushed the favoured saw of the statist hard-left tax-and-destroy ethos crowd back in the very same day as a way to "punish" those very same oil companies. Tim Worstall muses regarding one such group of usual suspects, Compass:

However, if, logically, those "excess profits" should be windfall taxed away in the good times then those "excess losses" should be subsidised in the bad times, no? So why isn’t Compass out there calling for a subsidy to Shell?

Two possible reasons I suppose. The first being that they’re too dim to understand what is going on, the logic of their own position. The second is that there was no logic to their earlier demands for a windfall tax. That it was just a circle jerk for frothing lefties.

I have to admit that I can see truth in both explanations.

Rinse and repeat, inserting your own favourite statist hard-left socialistic pressure group in lieu of Compass.