Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Walter Williams

(From Townhall.com today):
If you were really enthusiastic about not being a "price-gouger," I'd have another proposition. You might own a house that you purchased for $55,000 in 1960 that you put on the market for a half-million dollars. I'd simply accuse you of price-gouging and demand that you sell me the house for what you paid for it, maybe adding on a bit for inflation since 1960. I'm betting you'd say, "Williams, if I sold you my house for what I paid for it in 1960, how will I be able to pay today's prices for a house to live in?"

If there's any conspiracy involved in today's high gasoline prices, it's a conspiracy of cowardice and stupidity by the U.S. Congress. Opening a tiny portion of the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas production, according to the U.S. Geological Survey's mean estimate, would increase our proven domestic oil reserves by approximately 50 percent. The Pacific, Atlantic and eastern Gulf of Mexico offshore areas have enormous reserves of oil and natural gas, but like the Alaska reserves, they have been put off limits by Congress. Plus, the U.S. Office of Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves estimates the world supply of oil shale at 1.6 trillion barrels, of which 1.2 trillion barrels are in the United States.

By the way, oil shale is now profitable to extract due to the high oil prices. Reread the last sentence of the quote. The BLM is allowing testing in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah.

Invest in the companies doing the testing. Don't whine about high oil prices. Profit from it.

Read Williams whole article for a killer punchline.

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