All Posts Tagged With: "OPEC"
Trading for Security
Americans tolerate a costly global national-security apparatus in part because they believe the country would be economically vulnerable without it. After all, we use resources from all over the world—oil being only the most prominent example. What if an embargo cut us off from supplies? Anyone expressing skepticism about this is sure to be confronted [...]
24Nov2010 | Sheldon Richman | 4 comments | ContinuedUnintended Consequences in Energy Policy
On the first day of every economics class I teach I start with The Ten Pillars of Economic Wisdom. This is a list I have put together of the ten most important principles in economics. Pillar number six is, “Every action has unintended consequences; you can never do only one thing.” U.S. energy policy illustrates [...]
2Mar2009 | David R. Henderson | 11 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 | ContinuedEnergy Policy: Wisdom or Waste?
Roger McKinney (rdmckinney@cox.net) is senior analyst for a quasigovernmental health-care agency in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We can’t help ourselves. Americans crave the black gold that pulses through the concrete arteries of our nation’s transportation system. In the opinion of many, we have hocked our future for a cheap fix with a drug that abandons our nation [...]
1May2007 | Roger McKinney | 5 comments | ContinuedOPEC Sells Us Oil Because It Likes Us?
Jerry Taylor is Director of Natural Resource Studies at the Cato Institute. Slavish devotion to common but wrong-headed ideas about economics is never more in need of exposure than when the subject is oil and the Persian Gulf. Here wrong-headed ideas about economics can get someone killed. But there they were on full display last [...]
1May2003 | Jerry Taylor | 0 comments | ContinuedPower to the People?
Michael Lynch is a research affiliate with the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In his piece “The Power to Change the World: A Hydrogen-Based System Replacing Our Reliance on Oil Would Revolutionize Society” (Los Angeles Times, September 2, 2002), political activist Jeremy Rifkin lays out an argument for switching to [...]
1Jan2003 | Michael C. Lynch | 0 comments | ContinuedHigh Gasoline Prices Are Your Fault?
Who should be blamed for the high oil and gasoline prices? OPEC? The oil companies? The government? According to the New York Times’s Floyd Norris, if you chose any of those you would be wrong. Writing on June 23, Mr. Norris places all the blame for the current “energy crisis,” as he calls it, squarely [...]
1Nov2000 | Roy Cordato | 0 comments | ContinuedPaper Tiger
Christopher Mayer, a commercial loan officer, is studying for an MBA at the University of Maryland. Gadflies have long been predicting the exhaustion of critical natural resources—especially oil. Despite the doomsaying, a barrel of oil is cheaper today than a pair of movie tickets. As Daniel Yergin pointed out in a recent editorial in the [...]
1Apr1999 | Christopher Mayer | 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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