These attacks may be angering, wasteful, and harmful, but at least the government thugs give us opportunities to return to economics and civics class and remember who actually wields the aggressive power.
As Matthew Daly reports for the Associated Press, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and 22 of his Democrat Party allies Thursday called for the Biden Department of “Justice” (a misused term, if ever there was one) to “use every tool” at their disposal to prosecute what they claim is “collusion” and “price fixing” by oil companies.
Which requires us to ask a basic question: what “tools” does the U.S. Constitution stipulate the feds have to “prosecute” companies for “price fixing” or “collusion”?
That’s easy. The answer is zero. There aren’t any such “tools.”
The Schumers of this world pretend that the Constitution’s “commerce clause” allows the feds to control trade that goes across state lines. But “Father of the Constitution” James Madison in 1825 told friend JC Cabell that this was a misreading of the clause. It was written as a remedial measure, allowing Congress to handle State v. State trade disputes.
As Madison noted, the clause:
“…grew out of the abuse of the power of the importing states in taxing the non-importing, and was intended as a negative and preventative provision against injustice amongst the states themselves, rather than as a power to be used for the positive purposes of the General Government, in which alone, however, the remedial power could be lodged.”
But that’s not stopping Schumer and his pals from posturing and using their tax-funded positions to bluster about federal “prosecution” of people trying to bring us oil and gas.
Writes Daly:
“In a letter Thursday to Attorney General Merrick Garland and other officials, the Democrats said a recent Federal Trade Commission investigation into a high-profile merger uncovered evidence of price-fixing by oil executives that led to higher energy costs for American families and businesses.”
No, you are not hallucinating. Perhaps this kind of fatuous rhetoric gets you thinking about the many reports MRCTV has released covering the vast scope of not just the federal attacks on oil, coal, and gas exploration, refining, and even the mixture of what we put in out car and lawnmower engines, but of the central government subsidizing so-called “green” projects like dangerous and unworkable “electric vehicle” boondoggles.
Perhaps this kind of aggressive, Mussolini-like, rhetoric inspires you to remember who claims the legal power to take our money in order to fund their Senate salaries and fund this so-called “Justice” department.
Those facts sure put the terms “costs” and “price fixing” into proper perspective.
According to Daly, The FTC – contrary to the real meaning of the Commerce Clause – got involved in the “approval process” when Exxon Mobile offered to buy a company called Pioneer Natural Resources. The FTC claimed that Pioneer “colluded with OPEC and OPEC+ to potentially raise crude oil prices,” and, though they “allowed” Exxon and Pioneer to close the deal, the FTC rhetoric that this alleged Pioneer “collusion” with OPEC “may have cost the average American household up to $500 per car in increased annual fuel costs” and that’s inspired Schumer and his 22 pals to claim, get this, that this alleged source of higher energy prices is “an unwelcome tax that is particularly burdensome for lower-income families.''
Seriously.
Schumer and many of the same leftist politicians have ballooned government spending, which requires borrowing, borrowing that the Federal Reserve funds through purchase of US bonds. The Fed creates money to do that, and that inflation of the money supply destroys the buying power of everyone’s income.
Related: Granholm Downplays Biden's War on Fossil Fuels
Schumer and his pals also undermined Trump’s decrease of corporate income taxes (from 35 percent to 21 percent) by sliding a new “Corporate Alternative Income Tax” into their insultingly titled “2022 Inflation Reduction Act,” and in the 2025 budget they pushed ANOTHER increase of corporate taxes to 28 percent and higher personal taxes that, as The Tax Foundation reports, will see taxes eat an estimated $5.3 trillion of our income between 2024 and 2034.
“The increase in the corporate tax rate and the additional taxes on top earners would result in U.S. top marginal tax rates on income that are among the highest in the developed world.”
They sure care about our bottom lines, don’t they?
Heck, they care so much, they want to see the unconstitutional 19th Century “Sherman Antitrust Act” shot at the entire “oil industry”, offering this in the letter from Schumer and the 22 miscreants with whom he has so much fun in the Senate.
“Corporate malfeasance must be confronted, or it will proliferate. These alleged offenses do not simply enrich corporations; hardworking Americans end up paying the price through higher costs for gas, fuel and related consumer products. The DOJ must protect consumers, small businesses and the public from petroleum-market collusion."
Which lets us conclude by returning to class -- this time, not civics, but economics -- and to see what entity holds the power of coercion over us.
In a free market, businesses -- even corporate entities -- have to compete. Thus, even those that might try to “collude” with each other to “raise prices” cannot raise prices beyond what consumers will accept, because an increase in prices tells potential competitors that there is money to be made in that field and they will enter the market, thus increasing competition, and pushing costs down with an increasing supply of the good or service. The only way businesses can claim monopoly power without having to worry about competition is if they can block new entrants, and the only way they can block new entrants is through the power of politics, getting government (or “the state” in its normative terminology) to pass statutes that give the established businesses sole control or a cartelized form of control over the market.
This is the lesson seen over and over in the history of economics, competition, and monopoly, and it reminds us that the only entity that uses coercive force on others, the only gang that claims the power over people and claims the legal power to use guns against us if we don’t comply is the state.
The Schumers of which are using to tax and spend us into worse living situations, and which they now want to use to “prosecute” businesses that also are at the mercy of their egotistical, arbitrary, immoral whim.
The only good thing that comes from their “letter” to Garland is the opportunity it affords us to learn which group claims the power to make others do things. It’s not the oil companies. It’s not your local gas station owner, or your home heating oil seller.
It’s the U.S. government, operating in a way that Madison viewed as utterly inimical to the very Constitution he helped fashion.
Keep that in mind as you hear and see more of their poison posing, their posturing, and their vile claims that they are helping you, even as they point the government guns at you and business people trying to increase the supply of what you want.
Follow MRCTV on X!
MRC VP @Schneider_DC talks with CPI's @rachelbovard about how Big Tech is silencing conservatives pic.twitter.com/6STl80Q6Gw
— MRCTV (@mrctv) June 1, 2024