Forgetting The Fundamentals In Regard To Oil And Afghanistan.

            Basing price on cost plus profit is the way most businesses are forced to operate, of course.  Yet there have been many prior cases in history in which companies obtained the power to set prices far higher than cost plus profit.  Often, even usually, these were in industries that were monopolies or oligopolies.  The problem was met by imposing regulation, or breaking up companies, or opening markets to new competitors -- often foreign ones.  And maybe I am just ignorant, but I have never heard of the problem being solved by the use of futures markets.

            It seems to me that in considering what to do about the price of oil, our legislators should consider the question of how you bring prices back down to where they represent costs plus a reasonable profit (with due account being taken of exploration costs, which are a cost of doing business in the oil industry).  Maybe you have to do away with the speculating financer’s friend, the futures markets.  Maybe you need a law forbidding oil companies from pegging their sales prices to prices on the futures markets.  Maybe you need to have regulation of prices.  But whatever you have to do, it seems to me that the politicians and the ignorant media should start focusing on the piece of wood which you need to build a chair -- should start focusing, that is, on the basic economic principle of what is the cost plus a reasonable profit to produce oil and gasoline, and what do you need to do to ensure that the price is at that level, not at some artificially high level set by a speculative futures market on which some financers make killings while hundreds of millions of ordinary people get screwed at the gas pump.

            I turn now to Afghanistan.

            John McCain and Barack Obama seem to have different views on Iraq.  McCain, who appears never to have met a war he didn’t like, wants to stay in Iraq indefinitely.  Obama seems to want out as quickly as possible.  But different as they may be on Iraq, they seem to be clones with regard to Afghanistan.  They both would do more war there, would increase our warring there.  The politicians and media seem unanimously to agree with them -- all feel we should increase our military action there.

            So let me ask the start-with a-piece-of-wood question, the fundamental question.  That question is, why?  Why should we now fight a bigger war in Afghanistan?  What is our reason, our basis?

            It is easy to understand why we initially fought in Afghanistan -- we wanted to destroy bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan, and as much of his manpower there as we could.  Bin Ladin was the guy who attacked us on 9/11.  It is also not hard to understand why we should have attacked the Taliban there -- they had given shelter to bin Ladin and presumably would have done so again if they remained in power.  But what is our basic reason for, what are we accomplishing by, fighting in Afghanistan now?  Bin Ladin and Al Qaeda have moved to Pakistan (one of our purported allies no less).  They don’t need to use Afghanistan as their base and, as I understand it, aren’t.  Are we fighting the Taliban because, if we don’t, bin Ladin and company will move back to Afghanistan (move back to where Predators might be able to locate them and we could then drop missiles on them)?  Our government hasn’t said this as far as I know (and I am here assuming one could believe something that pack of notorious liars say), and why should Al Qaeda move back to Afghanistan when it is so impossible to get at it in Pakistan, where apparently we dare not attack even if we wanted to, because significantly jihadist Pakistan -- the land of Musharraf and Madrassas -- supposedly is such a wonderful friend of ours.

            Afghanistan, moreover, has twice in less than 200 years defeated the world’s greatest empires.  Remember the British column, 15000 men or so, was it? -- that went through the Khyber Pass at the height of the Empire and only one or two men, or anyway just a few men, of the column lived and returned to tell the tale.  Remember the Soviets in the 1970s and ‘80s, one of the most powerful empires the world ever saw and second only to us at the time, who were defeated and destroyed in Afghanistan?  We couldn’t even win in Iraq, yet we are going to fight ever more in the nation which already defeated the British and Soviet empires?  And we are going to fight in that nation even though Al Qaeda is now ensconced in Pakistan and has no need of Afghanistan?  What is it with the United States -- does it have some kind of horrific national death wish?  Or is it just the gross stupidity that Arthur Schlesinger identified shortly before he passed away, plus the failure of nearly all Americans to know history.

            Anyway the fundamental question -- the piece-of-wood-is-needed-to-create-a-chair point -- is why.  Why do both Obama and McCain say we have to fight a bigger war in Afghanistan?  What is their basis?  What is their fundamental reason?  Is it really only a desire not to be seen as wimps on national security?  Is there something more -- something both sound in reasoning and accomplishable in fact?  If so, what is it?  So far I know of nothing.  Let them enlighten us if I am wrong.*

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