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The gas prices are more complex to control than putting a price cap on. All putting a cap on gas prices will do is decrease the amount of gas available at the pump. The solution to the gas problem is more complex than that. What you really need is lower demand for oil.

So you put a price ceiling in place, that sounds good except for one thing this is a global economy. If the gas company can sell gas to China at twice the price it sells gas in the U.S. you simply won't have gas. Why would they sell petroleum to you if the government says it has to be at such and such a rate. The fact is you are competing with other markets to get them to ship the gas here.

In fact that is exactly what put us in this position. Everybody else bought into the American dream, and now places like China can afford to come sit at the big boy table. How the free market model works, when it works, is it keeps making the pie bigger. Right now however to many people are using oil for the pie baker to keep up, it is not that he doesn't have the pie for all of us, he just needs a break.

There is however a way that the lawmakers can help everyone out. If the government invested more into both alternative fuel sources and transportation methods, the demand for petroleum would go down. However it must be understood that it will not go down over night, it takes time to build high-speed electric railways.

A method to get a slightly faster result would be declaring a universal truce. You might not have noticed this but that big huge military uses petroleum to power its jets, its tanks, and some of its boats. If you pulled off the unprecedented feat of getting the majority of the worlds nations to declare a truce, the non-fighting forces could be drastically scaled back ,decreasing the oil expended on training exercises. Of course it is unlikely that any nation would really do this, especially considering that resource scarcity tends more to increase international tensions than relieve them.

It is however worth noting that nuclear arms are merely the punctuation on the statement that might does not make right. That is to say that the strongest were never the ones in control of the course of history, not in reality at least. War has never been an effective means of gaining control of territories outside your own. It only looks effective because the people that profit are not the ones paying for the war.

Although it sounds like a good idea at first glance to freeze oil prices, it is in fact a straw man. If you ask the senate to freeze the oil prices they will not do the things that need to be done.

Learn more about this author, Shawn Kew.
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