I went through once how microscopic a portion CEO salaries are of the money that runs through the oil business. If you paid them nothing, the bottom line would barely budge. And do you really think the anti-capitalists would hate them any less if their CEOs made only $300,000 a year?

Oil is expensive because those who lovingly watch out for our best interests have declared that there shall be no new major oil exploration anywhere but in nations run by psychotics. So it goes.

The futures prices are driven by fear and psychology. They would drop like a rock the second the first bit hit the dirt in ANWR. If this happens, the Democrats would have a lot to explain, since they killed ANWR ten years ago (the fields would be producing right now) which is why they don't want to see it happen.

What's ironic is that all through the first oil crisis liberals kept telling me that if we were paying as much for our gasoline as Europe paid for theirs, there'd be no shortages and life would be wonderful.

You have noticed that there are no gas lines, right? That our supply of a critical fuel remains healthy? You want the lines back, put the price controls on.

I made the point in the above post that as a percentage, oil company profits are reasonable, and that even if you go by the obscure ROCE numbers, that there are many other companies in many widely different fields with numbers in the same range, which says to me that those numbers are not unreasonable either.

This is not a real issue. It just gives people someone to blame.