Prices

While the Federal Reserve-induced stock market bubble has been flattened, despite continuous inflating by Greenspan's troops, the land price bubble continues to expand in Las Vegas. 

A few years ago, Paul Cwik came across an e-mail that was impossibly dumb. It called for a "Gas-Out." The idea was to boycott gasoline for a few days. This action would drive the price of gas down, and at the same time, it would show "Big Oil" that if they tried to raise prices again, we'd hurt them. The email is circulating again.

Artists often see themselves as underappreciated members of an elite that knows which cultural achievements are economically valuable and which are not. In actuality, profit drives businessmen to attempt a vastly more complex task: the estimation of actual consumer wants in a vastly complex and changing world.

Oil prices have reached a 29-month high, reflecting a variety of factors including the prospects for war. At the same time, the Producer Price Index recorded a 1.6 percent jump in January, the biggest across-the-board increase since January 1990. Just as the script dictates, writes Lew Rockwell, cries of "gouging" are now heard across the land.

In 1902, writes George Leef, those who aspired to enter the legal profession could take several different routes. One was simply to study law individually. A second route was to apprentice yourself into a law firm and learn what you needed to know in that environment--as Clarence Darrow did. The third option was to go to law school. 

Why are Maine farmers dumping milk? The way to respond to falling prices, writes Robbie Blevins, is to offer a better product more efficiently. The signal of the need to do so is a feature of free enterprise, the system in which the consumer—which is to say, the common person—is king.

To speak about average prices is like talking about average precipitation to a golfer, writes Chris Mayer. It either rains during a specific time period or it doesn't. There is no average that is anyway useful for an acting human being on a golf course. The only information that counts is what it is doing right now while he is teeing off. It is the same with prices.

It was September 11, and panicked customers were flocking to the two gas stations Bobbie Jean Harvey owns near Midland, Mich., to top off their tanks in case the supply of gas was disrupted. It became apparent that sales on September 11 were going to be above average. In hindsight, however, Ms. Harvey wishes she had closed her stations.

As oil and gasoline prices begin their annual rite of spring, I am waiting for another rite that occurs among media pundits and some economists—who ought to know better. That particular ritual is the accusation levied against oil companies that they are "manipulating the market" in order to force up prices. Like the oil companies two decades ago and electricity producers and distributors during the California crisis, the mantra is going to be repeated ad nauseum, "They are manipulating the market. That is why prices are increasing."

In deregulating its power system, California seems to have made every mistake possible, writes William Anderson. For starters, it forced utilities to buy power at market rates while capping what they could charge their retail customers. This devastated the utilities. It also sent exactly the wrong signal to consumers, who had no incentive to conserve.