The Big Bad Oilmen

Every time Oil Corporations make profits they are scorned, denigrated and accused of price gouging. Headlines scream and politicians pout, stamping their feet at the thought of one of our greatest industries daring to make record profits. But then politicians and news people are not known for their love of business let alone the businessman. My concern is why the oil executives never philosophically defend themselves and the profits (when they make them) that they earn.

We all know that high taxes and price controls don’t work. Remember the 70’s under former President Carter?

As the Investor’s Business Daily writes: “Strange how these proposals keep coming back up, like a bad meal. Given the history of energy price controls and taxes, they scarcely merit mention. But the danger is so great, they must be shot down immediately.” (read).

Well you can read what our bright politicos in Washington have tried to get away with historically and how detrimental their shenanigans were to the economy every time these politicos come up with control and tax schemes (http://www.investors.com/). What I want to talk about is the Oil Producer Executives who are in dire need of a “raison d’etre”. What I mean is, they need to let the world know what they do and how they do it: the long lead time the oil business is governed by when there are changes in prices and demand. It’s not exactly like oilmen go and pluck oil from trees or find it floating in lakes.

First they have to find it, which usually takes years, then they have to figure out a way to dig for it in a cost effective manner, then there’s the shipping to refineries, etc. etc. We are not making bread here folks.

The next step is to proclaim loud and clear that they are EXPLORERS and PRODUCERS and without them there would be no 21st century as we know it, that the long range thinking and planning to get the product from the ground to the consumer’s car, house and the thousands of other products that are derived from oil doesn’t just happen. It takes brains and brawn. Thinking and long range planning are not skills that a lot of people have let’s face it. Certainly the antithesis of these skills are what politicians possess.

Oilmen, stand up and courageously defend yourselves from politicos who will never be your equal at any level.

Ayn Rand in “For the New Intellectual” defines the businessman thus: “The businessman carries scientific discoveries from the laboratory of the inventor to industrial plants, and transforms them into material products that fill men’s physical needs and expand the comfort of men’s existence…He is the great liberator who, in the short span of a century and a half, has released men from bondage to their physical needs, has released them from …pestilences, from the stagnant hopelessness and terror in which most of mankind had lived in all the pre-capitalist centuries – and in which most of it still lives, in non-capitalist countries.”

Ms Rand writes: “Businessmen are the symbol of a free society-the symbol of America. If and when they perish, civilization will perish. But if you wish to fight for freedom, you must begin by fighting for its unrewarded, unrecognized, unacknowledged, yet best representatives-the American businessmen.” (America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business).

I salute American Big Bad Oilmen and I hope someday soon they can stand up to the politicos and news media and declare proudly what their profits are and that they EARNED the profits.