First, it was Trump. Then, it was Putin.
Now, President Joe Biden has a new scapegoat for rising gas prices — the gas station owners themselves.
My message to the companies running gas stations and setting prices at the pump is simple: this is a time of war and global peril.
Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you’re paying for the product. And do it now.
— President Biden (@POTUS) July 2, 2022
“My message to the companies running gas stations and setting prices at the pump is simple: this is a time of war and global peril,” Biden wrote in a tweet on Saturday.
“Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you’re paying for the product. And do it now.”
Many businessmen, economists and common-sense Americans were quick to call Biden’s tweet out for what it was.
Ouch. Inflation is far too important a problem for the White House to keep making statements like this. It’s either straight ahead misdirection or a deep misunderstanding of basic market dynamics. https://t.co/XgKfEICZpk
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) July 3, 2022
Included among the president’s critics was Washington Post owner and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos himself.
Do you agree with Sowell?
However, none of these voices debunked Biden’s argument quite as well as famed conservative economist and philosopher Thomas Sowell.
For years and years, angry leftists have blamed rising prices on “greedy” business owners. Sowell spent much of his life debunking such arguments in a series of columns, books and other written works.
Many of those writings apply so perfectly to Biden’s recent comments, it’s almost as if they were written in response to the president himself.
In a 2006 column, Sowell castigated California Senator Barbara Boxer for fallaciously blaming oil companies for rising gas prices when, in fact, the rise in prices was the result of the natural economic forces of supply and demand.
Replace “Barbara Boxer” with “Joe Biden,” and the following quotes apply perfectly to today.
“The real irony is that it has been precisely liberals like Barbara Boxer who have been the chief obstacles to increasing the supply of oil because they are dead set against drilling for oil in more places and against building more refineries,” Sowell wrote.
“When you refuse to let supply rise to meet rising demand, why should you be surprised — much less outraged — when prices rise?”
Another great example of Sowell’s work came in the form of a 2007 column in National Review titled “The ‘Greed’ Fallacy.”
“Every time oil prices shoot up, there are cries of ‘greed’ and demands by politicians for an investigation of collusion by Big Oil. There have been more than a dozen investigations of oil companies over the years, and none of them has turned up the collusion that is supposed to be responsible for high gas prices,” Sowell wrote.
At the time, oil prices dropped, posing an important question — why would oil executives all of a sudden become less greedy?
“Now that oil prices have dropped big time, does that mean that oil companies have lost their ‘greed’? Or could it all be supply and demand — a cause and effect explanation that seems to be harder for some people to understand than emotions like ‘greed’?” Sowell wrote.
