The whole thing is BS. Selling price should be determined by actual market conditions, not by what they think will happen. "Our cost may increase, so we need to jack up the selling price by 10% now, just in case..."?
The only way to get there is with heavy regulation and perhaps a revised legal framework for antitrust beyond the Sherman and Clayton Acts. Most Americans seem (rightly or wrongly, though I'm inclined to think more often than not the latter) to disdain regulation in the abstract.
In a "free market," rather than a sovereign setting floors and ceilings, the private actors with the greatest concentrated market power do. In today's world, those actors are the speculators and hedge funds, as well as the oil companies.
That's the free market for you. We have to take the good with the bad. We're the authors of our own misfortune. We (North Americans) buy gas guzzlers and drive everywhere, usually alone. We have nobody to blame but ourselves.
Indeed. I'm actually glad gas prices are rising high and wish they were higher. (So long as they don't rise on the backs of mass-murdered Iranians.) High gas prices create economic pressure for more rational and economically/environmentally sustainable behavior, such as:
(1) Higher-density living
(2) Public support for local mass transit projects.
(3) Rejigging the inefficient goods-distribution system in this country to focus more on efficient rail - yes, I realize much more needs to be built - for long-haul commerce, with road-based transit serving a hub-to-point role in local communities.
(4) Consumers who do need cars for daily transport will buy better ones, and markedly fewer lorries.
(5) Popular pressure to begin to wean the likes of ADM and Monsanto off of the corporate welfare teat, by ending subsidies for energy-inefficient corn ethanol.
