While everyone else was holding their breath last night to see if it was really going to happen, I thought I’d share my thoughts on a minor story that gave me a bit of a jolt while scanning WaPo on Monday (I wrote this last night but Polianna was down).

The headline read:

Cheney Rejects Federal Gas Tax Suspension.

I did a bit of a Jon Stewart face turning ‘’whaaaa???!!!'’. That’s not that evil. I went on to read the first paragraph. His Darkness said that it would only provide minimal relief and not address the real issue. I paused. Not only is this not all that evil, it’s actually true. So here’s Dick Cheney possibly saying something that’s both true and not evil? What gives?

So I keep reading and there it was:

And what it does is it avoids addressing the issue, which is, markets work; the law of supply and demand works. If you want to limit production of energy resources in the United States, that’s fine, you can do that, if in fact, that’s where national policy goes and that’s what the policy process produces…

But if I were to argue how it ought to affect the election, I think it ought to have negative consequences for those folks over the years who’ve worked so hard to limit U.S. production of energy resources. That’s my view of the world. Not everybody agrees with that, obviously, but we don’t drill off the East Coast, we don’t drill off the West Coast, we don’t drill off Florida, we don’t drill in important parts of Alaska. And that means we have less domestic production than would otherwise be the case. And the old law of supply and demand works, and when demand gets tight, those prices go up. And so today we’ve got $4 gasoline….

One way to change that is to increase our domestic production of energy resources, which we can do environmentally in a sound fashion. I would hope that would be one of the issues in this campaign. It should be a lively debate. I would expect that certainly my party will bring it up. I don’t know about the other party.

The Dick is against the gas tax because it would further deter Halliburton from cashing in off of drilling off the coast of Alaska. And on the seeming flawless market principles of Supply and Demand.

Two problems with the Veep’s econ. The first is viable alternatives - the economic concept related to price elasticity, where if the price of something goes up, viable alternatives become comparably less expensive. Like if the price of fossil fuels increases rapidly, the price of alternatives, like alternative energy sources for example, will become relatively less expensive. This would be amenable with a simplistic invisible hand of the market view would it not for the second point. And that is external costs, or externalities. I.e. costs external of something, usually borne out by others. Like the polar ice caps melting, or increased skin cancer from pollution. External costs are not factored into the market price, but are no less real. And in these situations you need government to protect society from bearing those costs while the greedy fat cats cash in. This is very important if you are considering energy markets from a rational point of view. So on top of endless war and debt, and crumbling infrastructure, consider the external costs incurred by the whole world from the mixed up minds of W. Bush and Dick Cheney.