Are Oil Industry Conspiracy Theories Just Easier To Believe?
This afternoon/evening I traveled to my fiance’s grandmother’s home to attend a family event. When I arrived a group of the men were sitting in the living room talking about gas prices. It was the usual sort of banter. Are they going up? Are they going down? What people are paying for gas in the various cities the people party to the discussion are from, etc.
At the end of the discussion one of the men involved said something along the lines of “Well, the politicians gotta keep the prices high so the oil companies get their profits.”
Now I can’t say that I’m particularly shocked at this utterance because it’s the sort of thing I hear all the time. In fact, I don’t think a day goes buy when I don’t have a conversation with someone who makes some vague reference to collusion and price fixing in the petroleum industry. Usually I just dismiss the comments as jokes, but what finally dawned on me tonight is just how many people actually believe that gas prices are the result of greedy corporate finks and their mindless political puppets in the government manipulating supply and demand to bilk Americans.
Why do people believe this? Is it really easier to believe that high gas prices occur because of a massive conspiracy between thousands of oil industry executives spread out through hundreds (if not thousands) of competing oil companies and hundreds of politicians from both sides of the aisle than to believe that high gas prices occur because of ordinary market forces?
Like supply and demand, for instance? One reason why gas prices have gone so high and stayed so high in recent years is because oil companies can’t easily increase production in order to keep up with demand thanks to government regulations that limit how much they can drill and even prohibit them from drilling in some of America’s most oil-rich areas (like in Alaska and off the coast of Florida).
Or how about taxes? The federal government alone makes $0.18 off every gallon of gasoline sold in this country, and the states make more with some of them slapping as much as $0.30 in taxes on top of what the federal government levies.
And let’s not forget the environmentalist lobby which has prohibited a new gasoline refinery from being built in this country at any time in the last three decades and has gotten our politicians to saddle gasoline producers with ridiculous regulations for boutique fuels and blends.
All of the things I’ve mentioned above are verifiable facts. They exist, and their impact on the oil industry and the prices we pay at the pump is obvious. So why, then, do so many people continue to insist that gas prices are the result of a conspiracy? A conspiracy that would require the cooperation – and silence – of thousands in order to work, no less.
I just don’t get it.
