Guilty of Profit

1973 has been the year of the Iynch mob mentality: hate campaigns to undo failure at the ballot box; prejudgement by the media instead of judgement by the courts; endless parades of partisan witnesses on the TV screen; testimony by convicted perjurors without right of cross examining them; embezzlement of unwelcome news items; screams of guilty until proven innocent; commerce in grand jury testimony; and the old liar's trick of truth, but not the whole truth.

This Iynch mob mentality is now being incited against the oil companies. They made a sizable profit in the third quarter of 1973; hence they stand convicted of raping the American people. Nationalize the vampires! The energy crisis will vanish once the oil companies are handed to the whiz kids who run the US Postal Service and the various wars on poverty.

No more monopolies, screams the multitude of networks, all three of them. No more windfall profits, they protest, as they rake in $60,000 for every minute of peddling vaginal sprays and mountain grown coffee (all coffee is mountain grown3. No more anti competitive practices, they urge, as their lobby redoubles its efforst to kill "pay" television, though every time you buy a product peddled on "free" TV, you are paying your tithe to the boob tube moguls. For $1,000 per second, they give you an endless fare of vulgar brutality and tell you how you are being raped by the oil companies.

This newsletter is not a mouthpiece of the oil companies, and we hold some things against them. For example, that for years they acted as the Arabs' tax collectors instead of countering the OPEC blackmailers collectively.

But where profits are concerned, we should not stoop to the (true) arguments that the 1973 profit was the first in a number of lean years, or that this profit was well below the average in the production industry, or that investment costs are extraordinarily high in the oil business, or that Exxon has just increased its capital spending budget by 73%to $6.1 billion. The real defense is that no defense is needed: There is no better incentive for energy research and development than the profit motive; and there is no surer way of making the energy shortage permanent than to stifle industry by taxes and government regulation.

If anyone ever doubted this, let him read below what is now going on with steel casings for oil wells.