Breaking Up Oil Producers

Call me naive but I don't think Hillary's plan of treating oil companies like drug dealers is necessarily the way to go about bringing down gasoline prices. Like Yglesias says, it's not that OPEC nations aren't producing oil, it's that demand has gone up so price invariably goes up. I don't think we as a nation have a very good track record of breaking up drug cartels much less making illegal drugs cheaper. The same would be true for oil cartels. Price wouldn't go down, it would go way up.

Instead of breaking up OPEC how about holding our own government accountable.


As you can see from the nifty image above I stole from ThinkProgress, the overwhelming factor in gasoline prices is crude oil itself. Treating those who produce oil as a cartel doesn't sound very wise to me. Instead we could focus on saving our devalued dollar, or how about ending the war in Iraq which makes the oil producing region entirely unstable adding fears to a very volatile market.

There's no doubt oil companies are price gouging and that Bush who personally makes millions from oil has done nothing to curb the gouging. To me that's where we should start and not bypass our self-created problems and blame it on something we really can't control, like OPEC.