The Obama solution is on the way...

By now it should be clear to everyone that President Obama is fed up with high gas prices. Why, his outrage is even more terrible than that of the public he serves. After all, Obama’s future may well depend on how the economy does during the next few months, and it is clearly the oil companies that are conspiring to bring him down. So he has conferred with the keen business and economic minds who surround him, identified the root causes of the problem, and come up with a brilliant, cohesive program to right this intolerable situation.

Our president’s first step will be to increase the oil companies’ costs. What insight! Why did we not see this before? Increase their taxes! If you increase a business’s costs, it will be forced to lower its prices. Come to think of it, this might be a good way to lower food prices as well. If grocery stores were forced to pay, say, 20 percent of their revenue to the government, Obama would have a whole lot more money to spend on GSA parties; and grocery stores would surely lower their prices.

Then another piece of penetrating insight was revealed: Free markets don’t work! Wow! Adam Smith had it all wrong. But remember, Clinton pointed out that it depends on what the definition of the word “is” is. In this case, the critical word must be “work.” The Obama administration has consistently defined the word “work” as, “Succeeds in taking money from those who have earned it so the government can give it to those who have not.” Do free markets reward the least efficient participants at the expense of the most productive? No! Therefore, they don’t “work.” QED.

Now comes the most compelling insight of all; it’s speculators who are messing everything up! After all, “speculator” is an ugly word — almost as ugly as the words TV shows are now allowed to spew at our kids every evening. Why, can you imagine a teacher asking her fourth-grade students to report on what their parents do for a living and little Johnny has to publicly admit that his father is a “speculator?” The shame! The guilt!

Then Johnny tries to point out that speculators add depth and resiliency to free markets — that when the price of a commodity sinks lower than economically sensible, they buy, thereby bringing the price up, and that if prices get too high they sell, pushing them down. And they move in to buy when nobody else is buying, thereby providing liquidity. So they stabilize markets. But we are far too smart to fall for that! President Obama says they are villains so villains they must be.

We could go on and on. Obama solves the problem by subsidizing oil’s competitors. He shrewdly takes money from the rich (many of whom are oil companies and their executives) and combines it with money borrowed from China and uses it to subsidize solar companies that go bankrupt and wind farms that kill birds so oil companies won’t be so successful at providing efficient, economical energy. He, with a single stroke of a pen, demands scientific and engineering breakthroughs that will allow cars to operate for six months on a single thimbleful of gas. By 2013! Or else! And if that doesn’t work he will take his case to an upstart group of people who weren’t even elected.

We all know he can do it. After all, he solved the problem of selfish banks wanting to deny home ownership to those who couldn’t afford it. If this attitude ever surfaces again, Obama will no doubt call upon the Secret Service to give them lessons in morality. And force bankers to watch government videos on fiscal responsibility.

Yes, solutions are on the way. If we will just give him four more years he will solve everything. He will stifle production until we produce nothing. He will import more and more until we import everything. He will make the poor rich and the rich poor. He will raise and extend benefits for the unemployed until nobody seeks employment (therefore, they will no longer be counted as “unemployed”). He will even take over the student loan industry so he can decide who should and who should not be eligible to get loans for college and who will and will not have to pay them back. (Oh wait, he has already done that.) He will ...

Just wait and see.

Greer is a resident of Rollins.