by Curtis Lemay

Created on: September 08, 2008   Last Updated: September 09, 2008

Have you ever been afforded the opportunity to work with in-patients at a rehabilitation center? Most commonly, behavioural patterns plop on the tracks of anxiety, verbal hostility and lack of information. There appears to be a parallel dependence on petrol. Anxiety borne of the lack of direct control of pricing, hostility borne of the denial that private companies should have control of pricing, lack of information borne of, to get all technical, the relative blocking of the mesolimbic pathway. Okay, forget about the last one.

Now, it's known that petrol prices spike with relatively direct correlation to international crises. Both World Wars brought the price per gallon to $2.90-3.10 in the USA, adjusted for inflation. Prices rose similarly during the Second Cold War. I hope we should all agree diplomatic instability is growing amongst the major producers (Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, USA, Mexico, Venezuela, Canada, Iraq). The "price gouge" battle cry not only shows a disregard for private property as a concept - it precipitates all players into picking sides at a time when the Moscow-Teheran-World relationship makes D.C.-Paris-Berlin look like Sunday afternoon spent pedal-boating on the pond.

Where there is stability, there is an abundance of goods and services available. This allows companies which have undergone tremendous growth during the years of stability to freeze prices when disaster strikes. Wal-Mart and Home Depot adopted this policy in the areas devastated by Katrina. A court calling "price gouge" would not have heavily impacted these two, but smaller businesses, many of which themselves had assets damaged during the hurricane, would either relocate or shut down until the price intervention passed. Provoking global confrontations doesn't appear a viable solution towards increasing supply, the real driving factor of current prices at the pump.

Supply is something we technically have, in the form of 2,175 gigabarrels of potentially recoverable oil. A majority sits unrefined in reserves because its main purpose, it seems, is to spark political diatribes. Nonetheless, the economic and technological means are available to avoid price gouging, to remove military support of Saudi Arabia, economic support of Israel and troops from Iraq. We could transfer regional oversight over to a capable, responsible EU (historically speaking). The costs of protecting OPEC, currently providing 15-20% of our annual petrol imports, far outweigh the gain especially when many of the rich young Saudis, benefiting from the relationship, become proponents of anti-Western literature or even involved with terrorist organisations.

So, why haven't we heard the faintly Wilsonian protests of "price gouging"? I'm afraid to say it, but is it possible the citizens have done their globalisation homework?

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