I think you missed carl's point, Larry: He's saying that, in petroleum, the free market is not working, and that the inexorable rise in the price of gasoline can't be explained by supply-and-demand.

There's oil and refined products in the pipelines, literal and metaphorical. The supply of gas at the pump wouldn't naturally be affected until some time after a refinery goes offline, or a source is cut off. Carl's point is that the petroleum companies are raising their prices not because their costs have increased, but because they anticipate them to increase some time in the future. That's not natural under free-market theory--competition is supposed to hold down prices until the last possible moment, when they're forced up by increasing costs.

In other words, it's plainly obvious that all the oil companies are acting as a cartel, whether or not they're formally a part of OPEC. The non-members use OPEC pricing as a pretext for their own prices, which means that the price of oil and oil products has become completely decoupled from market forces. Thus we see the distinctly anti-freemarket phenomenon of prices rising and, occasionally, falling, in perfect lockstep, across a global market.