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May 3, 2006

All Business: Vilifying oil industry is just 'quick-fix quackery'

  • It's more than a little bizarre to criticize a business for doing what it's supposed to do: turn the highest profits possible within the limits of the law.
    • By BRUCE MEYERSON
    AP Business Writer

    NEW YORK — Leave it to the politicians, with their exaggerated outrage over gas prices and oil company profits, to start interfering with market forces just as the laws of supply and demand are forcing tough choices that Washington has avoided for decades.

    Though oil companies make especially yummy villains to tar and feather in the public square, it's more than a little bizarre to criticize a business for doing what it's supposed to do: turn the highest profits possible within the limits of the law. So in the absence of any hard evidence of price gouging or other illegalities, it's somewhat slanderous and condescending to hear all this bleating in Congress, as if the oil industry has some special civic obligation to forgo profits unlike just about any other line of business.


     
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