All Posts Tagged With: "oil industry"
Self-Regulation in the Corporate State: The BP Spill
When companies are sheltered from the market’s disciplinary competitive forces, incentives turn perverse.
14May2010 | Sheldon Richman | 56 comments | ContinuedHands Off “Windfall” Profits
You don’t have to like the oil companies to reject the windfall-profits tax. All you have to know is that if you tax something, you’ll get less of it. No one can seriously dispute this piece of common sense. That leaves the strong suspicion that the motive for the tax is punitive: those companies are [...]
1Jul2008 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedPutting a Bureaucrat in Your Tank: Gasoline Markets and Regulation
If you run a barrel of crude oil through a still, the technique used by the earliest refineries and still a stage in modern refining, it separates into various fractions, including kerosene, gasoline, diesel, fuel oils, waxes, and asphalt. Without further processing, about 10 percent will be “straight run” gasoline. In the 1870s this 10 [...]
1Oct2007 | Andrew P. Morriss | 0 comments | ContinuedThe High Cost of Misunderstanding Gasoline Economics
National emergencies, wars, natural disasters—all these things tend to bring about expanded government power.1 Hurricane Katrina was no exception. In addition to promising to spend billions of dollars of other people’s money allegedly to “rebuild” New Orleans and other stricken areas, politicians have been equally generous with other people’s gasoline supplies. In many states, anyone [...]
1Apr2006 | Arthur E. Foulkes | 0 comments | ContinuedGasoline Prices: Why So High Last Spring?
Ben Lieberman is senior policy analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. Gasoline prices rose an average of 31 cents per gallon between late March and May of this year, with consumers in some parts of California and the upper midwest paying more than two dollars well into June. As with other recent [...]
1Oct2001 | Ben Lieberman | 1 comment | ContinuedVoluntary and Coercive Cartels: The Case of Oil
An important policy consideration is the ability of cartels to control prices. Too often this issue is discussed without distinguishing between voluntary, or free market cartels and coercive, or state-supported cartels. This distinction is fundamental. Coercive cartels distort the market, resulting in serious inefficiencies which harm consumers. Voluntary cartels, on the other hand, enhance market [...]
1Nov1987 | David Osterfeld | 4 comments | Continued-
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