WE GET REFEREE REPORTS. View from a Height comments on my homework.

I would also add two things: 1) Karlson implies the solution in his post: deregulate refining the way that we deregulated trucking. 2) My sympathies are not with the existing or big oil companies, they are quite selfishly with me, the consumer. What I want is increased capacity, whether it comes from StartupOil, or ExxonMobilChevronShell.

It's possible for a citizen to make either of those inferences. I'm in a somewhat more restricted position. Those comments were prepared testimony for a legislative hearing. I held myself to the same standard in that testimony that I attempt to maintain in the classroom. On matters of public policy, it is easy to identify inefficiencies. Sometimes, as is the case with the 1980 Motor Carrier Act, which ended a trucking cartel, it is possible with benefit of 25 years of hindsight, to claim a win for the economists -- and bipartisan support. (Transportation deregulation began during the Carter administration. Senator Kennedy, Cornell's Alfred Kahn, Chicago's Milton Friedman, were among the supporters.) Past performance, as they say, is no guarantee of future results. I don't want to be indoctrinating either my students or the legislators who were kind enough to invite me either for open-market policies or for more stringent environmental protection. Thus, I can raise the possibility of refiners using regulatory policy to impede construction, or I can use supply-and-demand to suggest that increased capacity lowers prices (and, to the extent that newer retorts are less polluting, reduces the environmental impact of the refinery although it might stimulate additional driving) but others make the call on rewriting the rules.