Long Lines at the Gas Pump?!

13 Sep 2008

Long Lines at the Gas Pump?!

My wife just called to tell me that she saw gas prices well over $4, when just a few days ago they had been around $3.60 here. This isn’t surprising; Hurricane Ike is knocking out refiners and causing prices to skyrocket, despite lower prices for crude.

What troubled me, though, was that my wife said there was a long line at Costco (where she goes to fill up the SUV). This bothered me because my free market Jedi training told me lines at the pump were caused by price controls, not Arabs or hurricanes.

However, all was well with the universe when she got to the pump and said, “Wow! With the Costco discount the prices here are only $3.80.”

Markets still work, apparently. (This is good, since I woke up with a headache today and didn’t feel like dealing with cognitive dissonance.) Though to quote T. Boone Pickens, “I say drill drill drill.” (That is where I will stop the quoting from T. Boone Pickens.)