Comments on: Profound economic pontifications

By: Josh Sowin

Josh Sowin — Sat, 03 May 2008 12:07:08 +0000

Maybe I’m inadvertently making it sound more profound than it really was. Thinking that greed is driving the price up instead of supply & demand, thinking that people “set” the market price, and thinking that the President has any power to set the price of oil shows a lack of a basic economic education.

By: Joey Mannon

Joey Mannon — Sat, 03 May 2008 02:00:08 +0000

This guy isn’t far off. Some of lower-middle class America actually know what they’re talking about, even if they tend to be a bit cynical about it. Besides, if the Peak Oil theory is correct (and I believe we’ll reach peak oil very soon), then someone better come up with a cheap alternative quickly, because oil won’t go down otherwise.

By: Josh Sowin

Josh Sowin — Fri, 02 May 2008 20:15:21 +0000

Yes, some of what he was saying is true. It’s the concepts behind them that I’m concerned with. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

By: Travis Seitler

Travis Seitler — Fri, 02 May 2008 20:04:56 +0000

“Oil is at, what, $130 a barrel? Greed. It’s all greed.”

Between crude oil futures speculation and five years of uninterrupted Federal Reserve printing presses, I think the man has a point here. Maybe not the one he intended, but a point nonetheless.

“The farmer’s ain’t growing any food for us anymore — they’re growing it all for fuel!”

Replace “food” with “corn,” and it’s closer to the truth. With the Federal Govt. subsidizing maize-based ethanol development, it’s more lucrative (right now) for farmers to grow corn for the gas tank. It also diminishes the amount of corn available for livestock feed, so supply and demand dictates that feed becomes more expensive. When the cost of livestock feed rises, every related grocery item (beef, poultry, milk, cheese, even corn-based cereal) will rise with it.

“It makes everything more expensive because trucks use diesel.”

The trucks shipping products back and forth along the U.S. Interstate Highway System do use diesel, and that does mean that higher diesel costs “trickle down” to the consumer in the form of higher prices for the products which had been transported via truck.

I’m not going to touch that last one. :)

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 02 May 2008 17:29:36 +0000

“To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.”

Henry Kissinger

By: Ray Fowler

Ray Fowler — Fri, 02 May 2008 17:11:52 +0000

For some reason your introduction to this piece made me think of the following lyric from the Bruce Cockburn song, You Pay Your Money and You Take your Chance:

“Just a deaf kid talking like Popeye to a large fleshy laughing man in a blue shirt”