Exxon most valuable stock

Doesn't this bother anyone? How can there supposedly an energy crisis and a faltering economy when Exxon has exceeded GE as the largest company? Keep in mind, GE does _everything_. It sells appliances. It owns media companies. Anything you can think of, they probably sell it. And so it makes sense for them to have huge profits.

But Exxon just sells oil! They're a goddamn energy company. They sell energy. That's it. And at a time when the world is struggling in a variety of ways with energy, they're becoming wealthier than they have ever been. Isn't something wrong here? Isn't this kind of like saying there is a lunchtime poverty problem in the school cafeteria while the resident schoolyard bully declares having "unprecedented revenue"?

You want to jumpstart the economy? Peg the price of oil, legally, to the export prices of producers. At this point, energy is infrastructure just as much as, say, roads are. It's retarded to allow utilities to be subject to the free market. Demand is highly inelastic. There's not much room for product or business practice innovation. It's just inviting usury and fraud.

The only possible justification for an energy free market, empirically, is that it drives innovation in oil exploration. Oil companies drop huuuuuuge amounts of money into finding new oil fields (as well as new extraction techniques). They use gigantic supercomputers (by gigantic I mean lots and lots of individual machines chewing away at input) to create detailed models of sonar soundings of the ground in order to predict where oil is likely to be. So, you could argue that the energy "market" is driving exploration of new oil reserves and increases in extraction efficiency.

But here's the thing, folks...everyone in the nation (nay, the world) has a vested interest in such innovations. Everyone. As such, energy companies are unnecessary middle men. They're skimming money for themselves off the top. There's absolutely no reason that we, as a nation, could not directly pursue such innovation and exploration on our own without making some dipshit oil executive rich to do it for us. Think of the entire nation coming together to form their own energy company (let's see...everyone coming together to pool resources for a common cause...I could swear there was originally a name for that...oh, it's on the tip of my tongue...oh, right! Government!...). People are then their own consumers. The profit goes back to the collective pool instead of to an oil company. It's a monopoly, but guess what: everyone holds part ownership in the monopolizing entity! They have no one to take advantage of but themselves!

Sound communist? Not really. Communism is mandating levels of demand. You don't need something unless I tell you you do. That's not what I'm talking about. This is an economically efficient system. Demand balances with supply. Unless, of course, you get a small number of government officials in charge of such a program who manage to tap the conduit of money from consumers to the government-owned oil company, in which case you're essentially in an identical situation to having oil companies syphon off the money. Same parasite, different name. In an ideal world, government would be transparent enough so that such a situation wouldn't occur, but we all know how likely that is...

I dunno...guess it's another screwed if you do, screwed if you don't situation. Conniving, greedy bastards will always manage to get their hands on people's money regardless of whether it's through a corporation or through government corruption. In a world where money buys politics, the line between the two is blurred anyway. The only way the system could ever work is if government were completely transparent, none of money, politics, and media overlapped with each other, and if people weren't stupid. I don't think any of those, let along all of them, are achievable. So maybe the Libertarians are right, in a way. Maybe the best of all possible worlds is where the chips are allowed to fall as they may without interference from a patchwork of laws created by non-independent parties aimed at achieving some abstract notion of justice (that no one really agrees on). It would be a shitty world, one where jungle law ruled, but arguably you don't do any better with a strong government in the long term anyway. At least in a Libertarian system you know that people are going to take advantage of each other from the get-go and don't have any illusion of an institution that is somehow supposed to be an arbiter of justice through some hazy notion of foundational morality. The ones that screw you are almost always the ones who claim they will help you, after all.

Makes me wonder if the ideals of the Founding Fathers are really breaking down...that the moral philosophy our government is based on is so outdated (quaint, as Gonzales would inevitably say) and misguided that it can't help but buckle under the crippling weight of reality. They assumed that the problem with previous governmental systems (monarchy, hysterical theocracy, etc.) is that government wasn't accountable to the people under it, and that if it were, things would ultimately take care of themselves. Clearly this is not the case. Most of all, they didn't account for the asymmetry of information. To do the "right" thing, you have to be informed enough to know what the "right" thing is. Most people don't know what the right thing is. I sure as hell don't know what a maximum safe mercury concentration in water is, do you? If someone tells you a particular level is "safe," how do you know that's true? If they tell you it costs too much, how do you know whether to believe them? If you rely on experts, how do you know they're experts? How do you not only know their motivations, but how do you know they actually know what they're talking about? Moreover, how do you know who you're hearing from is actually the majority voice of the "experts"? What makes you think that the media outlet you're getting the information from is being up front with you? Isn't it the government that's supposed to oversee that kind of thing? Do you see how circular this ends up being?

They also didn't account for the power of bullshit. They had the image of people as ultimately rational beings. We aren't. We're stupid, bigoted, irrational, and easily manipulated. What good is being answerable to your electorate if you can just manipulate your electorate into believing what you want them to? After all, as we all know, oil slicks actually make young seal pups' coats soft and supple...

No...the Founding Fathers fucked it up. Not that I really blame them...in their shoes, I probably would have made the same mistakes. But to even begin to have a functional government, we would have to reorient our founding principles to take into account the fact that information is limited and that people are stupid and follow the herd. And everyone would have to understand that. And that's never, ever going to happen. Conclusion? As usual, fatalism: in the end, we're fucked. Enjoy the handbasket ride on the way down. And if you can get that pesky conscience out of the way, the old aphorism of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" always works too...