Paul Krugman of the New York Times has an interesting commentary on the recent rise in oil prices. Krugmann is one of a handful of “mainstream economists” who don’t peddle the company line for Wall Street. Mr. Krugman has come to accept there is evidence that speculators at exchanges are driving up the price in spite of significant inventories on hand. Reports are that the US is sitting on a record surplus at this time. Read the fifth paragraph from the bottom. I thought in our free market system prices were based on supply and demand. That price should be based on inventories at the moment of purchase at the gas pump not on some assumed increase next month hanging on whether or not Daffy Quadaffi falls in Libya. Not that the US ever got any oil from there anyway.

This week in a statement to The Wall Street Journal, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy wrote that governments need to act to curb a “dangerously volatile” oil price that defies “the accepted rules of economics” …

Thank goodness we didn’t burden those who profit from the financial difficulties of a mass of poor chumps who have to squeeze their budgets a little more to fill the tank for their commute to work or fill the oil tank to keep the kiddies warm. We can thank the titans of finance and their employees in the government that at least the unemployed and foreclosed are released from the stress of budgeting a household.

Not to be a stick in the mud, but do you think the oil industry will be reporting record profits again this year? Will oil executives once again receive tens of millions in bonuses for their stellar stewardship of our precious fossil fuels?

Don’t you just love the free market where them that got get and them that don’t won’t.

Remember what the end times prophet said…

“The end times are here and there ain’t no hope.”