Just how little Democrats are acquainted with the basics of free market economics was again on display yesterday as Senator Hillary Clinton ratcheted up the rhetoric against rising gas and oil prices, while threatening to break up the OPEC cartel, according to Ben Smith at Politico.com.

“We’re going to go right at OPEC,” she said. “They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world, they decide how much oil they’re going to produce and what price they’re going to put it at,” she told a crowd at a firehouse in Merrillville, IN.

“That’s not a market. That’s a monopoly,” she said, saying she’d use anti-trust law and the World Trade Organization to take on OPEC.

Now, rhetorical excess in a close campaign is nothing new.  And OPEC is certainly a cartel… but it is certainly not a monopoly.  There are quite a few non-OPEC oil producers, including China, Great Britain, Canada, Mexico, Norway, Russia, and the United States.  And certainly anyone who believes Mrs. Clinton’s nonsense about breaking up OPEC deserves the coming lesson in reality.

Still, it fascinates me that she rails about the evil of monopolies, yet her own mandatory national healthcare plan is itself nothing more than a government mandated monopoly, with no options, no choices, and no freedom for individual consumers to say, “No, thank you!”

Democrats are such unwitting hypocrites!