What You Pay For

"If it was 7.8 million on a revenue stream of 114 million, nobody would say a word. But change 'million' to 'billion' -- the percentage is the same -- and everybody gets upset, because it is a big number."

That's John Hofmeister, President of Shell Oil, throwing down some facts of reality in the face of lies and bullshit designed to have you on your way to mo-betta phat Endarkenment by the end of the year. And there's lots of 'em (facts), too. Glenn Beck segment at YouTube. Watch the whole five-minute thing. Wladimir Kraus linked that.

Hofmeister says that we're twelve to fifteen years away from seeing significant domestic production increases at the pump. It should not be difficult to understand that the greatest part of that lag is located in Washington, where prissy little scribblers backed with main force presume to stand in the way of men of action who would get out there and produce in exchange for our production ("division-of-labor economy", kids) denominated in money. There is no telling how much of the cost of end products -- at least half a generation away now -- will have been devoted to "negotiations" and "partnerships" with these slugs: corporate legal departments living cheek by jowl with them for whole careers, accounting departments forced to count their bloated and rotten beans, not a single boot set anywhere without first referring to every sort of creep with a "mandate" and "authority" to make sure that some legislative committee hearing won't sling his ass on an election-year whim. All of that Rube Goldberg effort has to come from somewhere, but at least it's not a "windfall profits tax". You're going to pay for it, though. That's the price of not exterminating parasites.

Still, you'd be a lot happier now if they had let people produce oil for you here in America instead of acting like comic-book dingbats with all the guns in the world for more than a whole generation now, even if people like John Hofmeister had to go them begging with hat in hand for permission to go to work. (The very idea: outrageous.) And now, you're going to wait another half a generation for any of it to get going, if it ever happens at all.

I wonder if anyone here can understand my blazing contempt for anyone who calls any of this a "market".