Guest Commentary
God bless big oil
Mack Hall

Television stations often broadcast some sullen citizen glaring at a gasoline pump and complaining to the camera "This is ridiculous! This is ridiculous!" Just why a gasoline pump should merit ridicule is a secret best known to the ridiculer, but the image is often repeated on the tellyvision.

One imagines the news director telling his staff "Hey, guys, ignore the news out of Austin and Washington and the world, and go take some footage of some dimwit accusing a gas pump of being ridiculous."

One infers that the pump is taking abuse for the price of gasoline, which is not the pump's fault.

Verbally abusing the pump is as illogical as complaining about the price of gasoline in America, the cheapest gasoline on the planet.

I long for video footage of someone pulling an itty-bitty plastic bottle of water out of the box and complaining "A dollar for twelve ounces of water!

This is ridiculous!

This is ridiculous! The government ought to step in and ration water in order to protect us from the greed of the big water companies!"

Or how about a packet of twenty little paper tubes filled with dried vegetation: "Five dollars for a pack of cigarettes! This is ridiculous! This is ridiculous!" And it is.

The price of sody water is never considered ridiculous, or the price of coffee or beer, all of which cost far more than gasoline.

Gasoline is more expensive than it used to be, but I have a solution to that: knock off the taxes.

Every taxing entity, rather like the Mafia, takes its cut as the gas truck rolls through: the feds, the state, some counties, and some cities.

Taxes are in themselves good; they support roads, hospitals, schools, and the ten per cent of the population of Mexico that for some strange reason prefers to hang out here.

But are taxes meant to be punitive?

No taxing entity ever takes the risk of exploring, drilling, pumping, processing, and distributing fuel. Private enterprise takes the risk, and if the risk fails, the entrepreneur takes the fall.

Another solution to the price of energy is for government to allow the drilling of oil and the digging of coal, regardless of the feelings of a stupid penguin or some obscure snake that not even the French will eat.

Arabia allows unrestricted drilling, and Arabians seem to be doing fine except for chopping off each other's heads every now and then.

Shell, Mobil, Exxon, Texaco-Whatever, Chevron, BP (I guess the ritish etroleum bits got blown up with the plant), and all the other oil companies explore and drill for dead dinosaur DNA, process it into hundreds of different products (gasoline is only one of them), and offer these products for sale.

If I don't like the product or the price, I am free not to buy them. That's the whole concept of a free market economy.

Government intervention?

Why? This would be the same government that runs passenger trains, our national borders, the District of Columbia, The EPA, the IRA, and Iraq, and you know what successes those endeavors have been.

Those numbers on the pump aren't ringing up profits as much as they are ringing up taxes and EPA regulations. No government will ever sell me a gallon of gasoline; they will only punish the oil company and me.

I love Big Oil. You should too.

And for pete's sake, don't hassle the nice lady behind the counter; she's making only minimum wage and the coffee!

Mack Hall is a resident of Kirbyville