Since I'm not running for office, I can say that Alex Tabarrok is right about this. The high price of gas is not due to greedy oil companies obsessed with profits. "It's not the high profits which are causing the high price. It's the high price which is causing the high profits." Indeed, the whole frame that gas should be cheap and any deviation from that state of affairs is evidence of a rotten scam is rather unhelpful. The basic problem is that too many people are too dependent on too-scarce a resource. That's not going to change. Gas will become "cheaper" once people don't really need it anymore and demands fall off. In the short-term, you can institute policies and rebates that ease the burden -- a tax cut, say -- but you can't make gas cheaper, and pretending otherwise just locks you in the same vicious cycle. We often use addiction as a metaphor for oil consumption, and it's not a bad one: If a friend was complaining about the cost of cigarettes, your advice would be to stop smoking, not lobby Congress for a subsidy.
