It shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s been tracking the far left that nationalizing the oil industry is their latest brainstorm. Take a look at this video – it’s amazing to me that they’re so brazen about their desire to steal the investment made by stockholders of these companies. It’s quite staggering, really, that they can be so bold. The justification? Oil should never have been a private commodity in the first place, so nationalization would simply be righting a decades-old wrong.
Evidently this whole private property thing is just fad, not a basic American right. Well, why not? Economic powerhouses like Mexico and Norway have done it and look how important they are on the international stage. We should definitely be following their lead. </snark>
I particularly enjoyed the bit about what a good thing it would be if Congress was in the business of setting oil prices, as if nationalization could somehow circumvent the cost structure involved in the oil and gas production business. Yes, the government could set prices below cost. But they’d just have to borrow more money from taxpayers to subsidize these discounts.
The irony of all this is that the stick that liberals are using against the oil companies – high gas prices – would eventually allow some of their most prized objectives – alternative energy sources, etc. – to come to fruition if they simply shut up and left the energy industry alone to develop reality-based solutions.
But what fun is being liberal if they’re not allowed to subject anyone else to their delusional fantasies?