General Discussion

I'm fascinated by the idea that so many people seem to hold that the government should be run like a business when they actually have the opposite objective.

Just as in this case, the only effective way to keep oil prices low would be to circumvent the capitalist process and put all of the oil under the control of a governmental system that could deliver it at wholesale cost to the public. With big-business at the controls you get what the market will allow....

Two-thousand years ago, the Roman empire did something like this with grain under the Cura Annonae system. It is interesting to think about the fact that the pursuit of energy from the sun--whether in the form of plants from which we get food and make fire; animals which we consume or put to work for us; or the remains of the plants and animals that turned into fossil fuel over millions of years--is the largest driving factor of all of human existence. So much so that we are well on our way to destroying the very planet that has allowed us the ability to harvest this power source.