Most of the time I am a believer in the free market. I always thought that the free market brought about good old fashion competition which I think is a good thing for the consumer. I like it when people are competing for my business. So what is going wrong today? Are we truly working with a free market here in the United States? I am no specialist in this field, I am just a consumer but I would have to say no.  Has there really been a free market system in America? I am no expert but probably not in our lifetime. There are many offenders but I think the biggest offender now is oil.

Is there truly healthy competition in the oil industry? If there is I don’t see it. When you have a cartel that meets and discusses how much oil will be drilled and made available to the market does not seem to make for a very competitive market. OPEC stands for Oil Producing Exporting Countries. We are talking about Countries not companies. These countries get together and discuss oil demand and prices. They set how much oil they are going to release into the market to maintain the profit margins that they want to meet. Does that sound like a free market to you? It doesn’t sound like one to me. That is market manipulation and collusion at the expense of the consumer. There are 13 countries that are members of OPEC and of course we are not one of the countries. In fact in you look at some of the countries you will think of terrorism as much as you think of oil. The first 3 on the list are Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq. I don’t know about you but I don’t get a warm a fuzzy feeling when I think that those three countries have to ability to manipulate our markets. We have many people yelling that this is Biden’s fault and I look at how the oil business is set up and wonder how in the hell can it be any President’s fault. We are talking about a market that we have very little control over. The market is not consumer driven and we do not have companies really competing for our business. What we have is countries wanting to maintain their power over the oil market which in-turn makes so they maintain the power over the consumer.

Because of the mobile lifestyle of the average American the price of gas is very important to everything that we do. Most of our goods and produce are delivered by using fuel. As price of gas and diesel fuel goes up and so does the price of everything else. We pay more at the checkout line at the local Publics or Piggly Wiggly just like we pay more at the pump. I think that the inflation starts with the price of oil. Now as I say that I am not an expert in this field but these are things that I observe. The first thing that started the price of fuel going up in this country was when the Colonial Pipeline was hacked by the Russians group Darkside. Gas jumped to over three dollars a gallon and after the pipeline restarted did the price of gas go back down? Nope. Then came Hurricane Season and with every storm the price of gas would jump more. Because of Covid you would think that there would be a glut of oil on the market because people were not traveling as much which should bring the price of gas down.  Instead they cut production to maintain the high price. Our economy begins to recover do they increase production to the pre-pipeline level? Nope, because they can maintain record profits without increasing the production so the price of gas just kept going up. Someone has to first tell me how this is any President’s fault and secondly, someone has to explain to me how this is good in a free market system where competition is suppose to keep the prices down for the consumer? I would think that market manipulation is not a good thing for a free market system. I do know that it is not a good thing for the consumer.

Now the OPEC countries are countries that control the oil industry in their various countries. The King of Saudi Arabia controls the oils production on his country which has some of the biggest oil reserves in the world. When a king or a government own and control the production on oil that is not capitalism. We claim that we are a capitalistic system but when much of the world does not work under the same system and the same rules how that can be our President’s fault. What would happen if our government took over our oil production like the government did in Venezuela? That would never happen but believe it or not it probably would be good for our national security. Would it be good for our economy I don’t know but at least if there was a shortage and the prices went up we could then blame the President. Until that happens I think that we have to look at the real reasons which our President has no control over.

We subsidize oil twice in this country. One is through corporate welfare and the other is at the pump. The public should be demanding that their Senators and people is Congress stop taking bribes from the oil companies and the foreign governments that control the oil companies and start working for a real solution for the American Public. Congress is one of the problems along with our corrupt political system that put money into our representative’s pockets and takes money out of ours. The playing of politics by too many of our elected officials are costing us money and it isn’t our Presidents fault.