Rising prices tend to self-correct...

Steve Chapman in The Washington Times:

...The market economy's beauty is rising prices tend to self-correct. They stimulate investment, which in time raises output. But if the government threatens to step in every time prices jump, oil companies will see no point trying to expand reserves or boost production.
    The paradox is this: The surest way to get lower prices tomorrow is to put up with higher prices today, The surest way to get higher prices tomorrow is to insist on lower prices today.
    This is a matter not of theory but experience. When Ronald Reagan scrapped oil and gasoline price controls in 1981, critics said prices would soar. They did, but not for long. Supplies rose, consumption fell and prices began a long decline, which left us all swimming in cheap gas and spoiled beyond belief.
    In reality, today's prices aren't so high. Two dollars a gallon may sound onerous, but after adjustment for inflation, it's less than we paid from 1979 through 1985....(via Betsy Newmark)

Not long ago I quoted the Washington Times and some troll commented that, since Sun Myong Moon was one of the founders of the paper, it was tainted, and it should be presumed to be a sinkhole of lies and absurdity, (and also that I was tainted for quoting it.) That was just a bit of the lunacy certain people exhibit at the thought of losing their monopoly on public discourse.

Thinking about it, I would tend to turn the "tainting" around. The frequent good-sense one sees in the Washington Times makes the Moonys, by association, seem a bit less flaky.

Posted by John Weidner at May 22, 2004 11:37 AM