We're the enemy!

No, I’m not talking about the war on terror or our invasion of Iraq, or any of the usual stuff that people write about whenever they want to discuss how much the world hates us.

I’m talking about US—ourselves! We’re our own worst enemy. Some parts of the world do hate us and would like to destroy us. But, this is not MOST of the world.

But, when it comes to what we, the people, of our own country do internally to solve our problems, we can be abjectly stupid.

I think the problem lies in the apparent fact that we like to view things as we think they should be or, perhaps more to the point, as we wished they were. It’s a dangerous thing to do. And, as a nation, we didn’t always think this way.

Early on in our history, we had to live on what we earned. We had to make do with what we had. Local government authorities, for the most part, took care of local problems and provided local services. The federal government handled the national issues and provided national services.

The system didn’t always work, but that was life. The point is that the system forced us to handle things more democratically. We came together and voted on things. We came to generally acceptable compromises.

Not everyone was happy with the way the vote went, but it kept the national government from running our daily lives. It provided for a much smaller national government.

It also forced the federal government to enact measures in the best interest of the majority. Sadly, this is not so today and has not been the case for the past hundred years of so. In fact, over the past 50-years, it has become downright intolerable.

Here in Delaware, the price of a gallon of gasoline has reached $4 a gallon. In some states it’s higher—lower others, but not by much. We’re outraged over it as though it’s not our own fault.

We’re convinced that it has to be a plot. “The ‘big’ oil companies are ‘screwing’ us,” we claim. “The government needs to do something about this, we scream!”

Well, we have ourselves to blame. Yes, our government could have done something, but it didn’t because we would not have elected national representative who would have advocated such action.

Economics is not all that complicated once we skim off all the technical jargon aimed at making it sound overwhelming.

Seemingly, hundreds of years ago, I had to take a few economics courses at the Wharton School of Finance. I encountered a tough professor there by the name of Dr. Irvin Miller.

Although I thought he was the meanest, most miserable, opinionated old dude whose parents, many of us believed, were never married, I did learn a few basic tenets of economics.

I’m not going into any detail about what I leaned or didn’t learn. I’m not going to discuss Dr. Miller’s teaching techniques other than to say that he’s probably dead now, possibly even in Hell if such a place exists.

No, I’m just going to apply the principles of supply and demand to the price of oil, along with some of the steps that we should have taken to change outcomes or, since we didn’t, what our federal government should have done despite our wishes.

Skim off all the fancy jargon, and we realize that supply and demand are intuitive concepts. The more of something there is, the less it costs to buy it. The less of it there is, the more it costs to buy it.

Oil trades on the world commodity market. The only way to make the price of a commodity drop is to buy less of it. And, since the United States buys more of it than the next 5-consummers combined, the price of oil would come down if we bought even moderately less of it.

Another simple concept in economics is something called an “equilibrium” price. This, in simple terms, is the price at which market consumers are willing to keep paying for something.

Raise a commodity’s price above this level and we’re going to buy less of it. Keep raising the price of it and we’re going to buy even less, still.

I think, at least in the United States, this price hit at around $3.50 a gallon. It got our attention and folks began to cut back. We hit the buying “even less of it” point at $4 a gallon.

Here’s the problem, though. We could have hit this point over a year ago had our federal government had the gumption to do something about it.

When the price of gasoline hit $2.50 a gallon, the feds could have slapped $1 a gallon tax on it. We’d still have had to pay $3.50 a gallon for our gas, but the extra money would have been going to OUR government instead of to far less friendly ones: Iran and Russia jump into my mind!

An added benefit would have been the beginning of our consumption cutbacks. We’d have begun showing our displeasure for the price then and the price wouldn’t be hitting $4 a gallon and threatening to go even higher.

Remember, we consume more oil than the next 5-world consumers combined do. If you were a supplier, could you afford to have your largest customer cut back on purchases by 20- to 25-percent?

I’m a Conservative. I hate taxes the same as others do. But sometimes a tax can be a positive thing in the end.

Even though Conservatives would rather have their hemorrhoids ripped out with needle nose pliers—sans anesthesia—than even mention “taxes,” this one would have been an appropriate one.

People will send me email telling me that this would not have helped because world demand for oil was increasing. I agree; it was. But, the demand would have to increase one hell of a lot to make up for the drop in this country’s demand.

Besides, once we jump on the conservation bandwagon and begin seriously searching for ways to develop alternative energy sources, the rest of the industrialized world will follow suit.

As it stands now, the price we now pay for gasoline has begun to exert its domino effect. Everything else is going up, causing cutbacks in those areas.

The average American citizen is in a difficult situation. We put OURSELVES there because we have a seemingly overwhelming “consume now and worry about it later” mentality.

Even when our government exercises good common sense, it seems to be such a rarity that we don’t trust them. We don’t elect people who raise our taxes.

If we were not so fast on the tax draw to support our pork spending and other nonessential things, we’d be more open to a legitimate tax.

Be back next week. Have a great one.

Joe Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.