The Price of Oil in Gold

The scramble is on for politicians (and idiotic college students) to once again find a boogeyman to blame for high gas prices. And instead of "evil big oil" or "George Bush," it seems the socialists in the country have chosen this time around (drum roll please);

"Greedy speculators!"

So in addition to;

"The rich use loopholes"
"Republicans just want to give tax cuts to the rich."
"If we just cut subsidies to big oil we'd balance the budget."
"It's corporations keeping us down."
"The rich don't pay their fair share."

you can now add;

"It's because of greedy speculators"

to the list of inane and utterly false premises faux intellectual leftists use when talking politics at parties or social events to make themselves sound educated.


Of course the reason you come here and tell your friends to come here is because you have this thing called "intellectual honesty." You want to know the truth, you care about the truth, because ultimately you know that if society makes decisions based on falsities and lies, it will ultimately collapse. Ergo, you know the Ole Captain is always going to give you the truth. And not just the truth, where like most politicians I say "you'll just have to trust me." No, I spell it out for you in wonderful, empirical charty goodness.


So today's economic lesson of the day is "How Much Would Oil Cost If We Used Gold as Our Currency Instead of the Dollar." Well shucks howdy, here it is all chartified for you by the Captain;



You see, the price of oil REALLY hasn't gone up that much. Matter of fact, the "real" price of gas has gone down. It's more that the value of the dollar has dropped so precipitously that it takes 3 times as many of them to buy the same gallon of gas it did several years ago giving people the impression gas is getting more expensive. But if you were using gold as a currency (they used to do that you know), today's price of a gallon of gas would be $1.36 equivalent.


Now I would go on about how the dollar collapsed and how trillion dollar deficits caused it, as well as social security and medicare undermining it caused it, and how this is more or less the left's fault, but I'm not going to waste my time. People on the right already know the economics behind this. People on the left willfully choose to ignore it and blame it on "those darn evil greedy speculators again!"


Instead, I'm going to go install Active Directory on a computer and make myself a Window's 2003 DNS server. Because those skills cannot be undermined by a collapsing dollar.


Enjoy the decline!