Defending Cartels.

I called in at the filling station in Ashbourne today to get diesel. They didn’t have any. I’ve never known them not have diesel before, and I wondered whether it had anything to do with the raids that have been made on several European offices of leading oil companies. There’s a suspicion, apparently, that the oil giants have been colluding to fix prices for decades, and that’s illegal.

Well, illegal or not, I’d be very surprised if they hadn’t been fixing prices. We live in an almost totally free market economy now, and I’d be surprised if the free marketers didn’t consider price fixing to be, at least de facto, perfectly acceptable. The corporate world has its own mores which don’t always accord with the law or ethical standards. It’s the price they consider it reasonable for people to pay in order to have more gadgets, more trinkets, more holidays, more debt, more stress, and a more detrimental impact on the natural world.

I wish I could think of something funny to say.