 Let's start with the U.S. Let's start with President Biden, basically going on television and threatening, yeah, threatening the all companies, the U.S. all companies, basically saying to them, you either start taking your profits and investing them in more all production or we're going to tax them. We're going to basically steal them from you. We're going to take them from you. Now, this is outrageous and immoral and stupid economically on so many fronts. It really is hard to know where to begin. I mean, Biden, like most leftists are clueless when it comes to economics, they're clueless when it comes to incentives. And of course, in this case, you know, they are in complete denial or more appropriately in complete evasion of the consequences of their own actions, of the consequences of their own actions. So if you remember, in the debates with Trump when Biden was running for president, Biden basically declared that he wanted to end the oil industry. In the left, generally for the last, I don't know, 10, 20 years has been advocating for eliminating fossil fuels as a source of energy. They have restricted the building of pipelines. They have restricted the opening up of new areas for oil drilling. You know, probably the maybe the best thing the Trump administration did while Trump was in was in office was the opening up of offshore drilling of many other areas. Generally, energy policy was a strength of the Trump administration. And Biden and the Democrats have declared that they would reverse all that and they've done much to reverse all that. And clearly, we have an administration that is dedicated to and has been dedicated to and declared that it will become even more dedicated to in the future. The annihilation of this industry, the entire industry, and they are dedicated to providing disincentives, at least they were until recently, disincentives for drilling for new oil, for new oil explorations, for investing in all explorations. Indeed, I remember a year ago in January of 2022 before the war in Ukraine, before anything, I was at an investment conference in Miami and met somebody I've known of the years and he was starting a new fund and what they were doing was raising money. And he basically said, look, the oil companies will not invest in new production because the atmosphere in Washington, but the atmosphere, the ESG atmosphere, ESG environment, society, governance, driven by BlackRock and others, the atmosphere from shareholder activists, from pension plans, who are shareholders from the largest shareholders in the country, culpers and culsters, the California pension plans, everybody is telling all companies, you must not drill. Because by drilling, you are killing humanity. You are destroying planet Earth. You are making it impossible for human beings to live on the planet. You are causing the climate to change. So stop drilling. We want prices of oil to go up. We want there to be a shortage of oil because that will drive investment into windmills and solar panels and other magical animals. That's right. I owe a review of that movie, Magical Animals and Other Strange Beasts or something like that, which I will do this coming weekend. I saw the movie, so I will do it. Anyway, since Biden became president, before Biden became president, and for years and years and years now, the Democratic Party overall and the leftist in Congress and the ESG movement and the climate change movement, everybody else have been anti all companies, anti investment, anti growth. If you remember, I think it was Exxon had three board members elected who were basically elected under the platform of we want Exxon to stop drilling for it. We want Exxon to diversify away from oil. We want it to become some other company other than the oil company. Complete insanity. Now, when the winds shift like that politically, unfortunately, most of these oil companies are going to say, yeah, I mean, uh, every time we drill, every time we start new production, every time we invest in capital expansion, every time that happens, we get hammered. We get hammered in the marketplace by these institutional investors. We get hammered by the government. The government wants our necks. So let's not invest and let's just, you know, benefit as the price goes up from the windfall profits that exists because what happens? What happens in a normal market? Well, in a normal market, if there's a shortage because of war, because of, I don't know, some supply constraints, then prices go up. Prices go up. Companies look at that and say, whoa, prices are up and they invest in more production. They go drill for oil. They go drill for oil, which supplies more oil, which causes prices to come down. Every market is the same. It always happens. This is kind of the beauty of a free market is that it self-corrects, that supply matches demand, that prices gravitate generally downwards. This is why it's unnatural. For example, for home prices in the United States, they only go up. And the reason for that is supply constraints, political supply constraints, because when prices go up, you've got a massive incentive for home builders to build massive quantities of homes, which drives the prices down. It's a self-correcting, beautiful mechanism. Problem is that when you constrain supply either through regulations or through other forms of pressure, as Biden, Democrats, and their allies throughout the culture have done for years now, then what you get is an industry that says, we're not going to invest. We're just going to watch prices go up. We're going to benefit. We're going to weaken the windfall profits, and we're not going to invest them. We're going to give it to the people who deserve them, who have invested in our company and who basically are shareholders. We're going to give it to their owners. We're going to give these profits to the people who are the ones who are brave enough and strong enough and committed enough to invest in fossil fuels. And this, of course, is causing Democrats to flip out, because what has happened is before the war in Russia, they seemingly didn't care. They thought they had this all handled. Yes, prices were going to go up a little bit, but overall, that would drive investment into solar and wind and so on. But what's happened is prices have gone up a lot. And as a consequence of that, what has happened is Democrats are not very popular. The Biden administration is not very popular. As a consequence of the war in Ukraine and constraints and supply and an OPEC restricting supply. What you have now is a limited supply. Demand is still strong, although as we head into recession demand will weaken. And prices are up and all companies are making a lot of money. Russia is making a lot of money. Saudi Arabia is making a lot of money. And Democrats are going to lose big in the elections next year to a large extent or to some extent because of gas prices. People are blaming them as they should for high gas prices. So Biden is furious because the market is not working. The market is not working the way it's supposed to look. Well, when you don't allow the market to work, when you threaten the market, when you penalize the market, when you put political pressure on the market, yeah, it doesn't work, Biden. Go take a econ 101 class. So they're panicking. They're going to lose the election next week. They might lose it very big. And they want to do something that will lower gas prices, that will lower energy prices. So they need to get the all companies to invest and all companies are saying, we're not going to invest as long as you have this anti fossil fuel mentality. We're not going to invest just so you can screw us later. Subbiting says, okay, you don't want to invest. So we're going to tax this profit. In other words, we're not going to allow the the owners of your companies to actually make money. Why? Why? Logic just because we hate you just because you're not doing what we tell you to do. Political black man. Now, it turns out that Biden doesn't have the votes to get a windfall profits tax pass. So it's just blowing air, which is often what he does. Oops, my computer just went flying. But just the idea of threatening. Now it's, you know, it's stunning, you know, that people can't see the consequence of their own actions. The left can't see that they have created this problem that they are going to suffer from. They're the ones who caused all companies not to be investing in new production. Yeah, they're gonna, they're gonna lose an election maybe because of that. It serves them right. They deserve everything they get. Now, beyond that, well, it is true that all companies right now are making a lot of money. Most of the time, all companies are not particularly profitable businesses. It's super competitive. There is plenty of supply out there, you know, in an environment where you can actually access it. Margins are generally pretty low. Profit margins and profitability is fairly low. It's lower than the average, I think, of the S&P 500. It's lower in other words than other companies. Often there are periods in which all companies lose money when there is after a period where everybody's invested in production, everybody's invested in drilling, all prices can tumble to levels. You remember, what was it, in 2020, where people were paying you to take their oil because all prices were so low. And they, and it was being stored everywhere and people were running out of capacity to store. So they were giving it away. So in those days, all companies had negative margins. In other words, they were losing money. Did the government jump in to volunteer to soften the blow that they created because of COVID restrictions? I mean, no. And they shouldn't have. Let the cycles happen. But part of the cycle is that there are going to be periods in which the company makes a lot of money. And then other periods when they make very little money. It's none of the government's business. Just stay out of it. I mean, the whole tax regime that we have is completely irrational and immoral and and, and, and, and badly structured and badly incentivized. And it's, it's a complete disaster. But the idea that, eh, today I'm going to increase taxes tomorrow. I'm going to triple taxes because you're making too much money today is just so nutty. It's so non objective. It's so random. It's so a feature of arbitrary power of the kind of power that can be wielded whenever and at whatever. So I think I'm back. Yeah, we're back. All right. Video is back. So yeah, I mean, it's just an illustration of how, how pathetic this administration is, how clueless it is about economics, how clueless this is about, about incentives and how incentives work. You want to get prices down of oil? I'd like all prices to come down. You want to let prices come down? Change your attitude to its fossil fuels. Change your perspective. Start talking about, start, start talking about the wonders and the, and, and, and the fact, I mean, I'm looking out on the skyline of New York. I'm literally in the middle of Manhattan, near Times Square, and I see all the lights out there all fueled by fossil fuels. I mean, it's a beautiful site. It's an amazing site. It's one of the greatest sites of planet earth, the site of great human achievement, the site of, of, of great industriousness, a site of, you know, people, people working and achieving and building and creating all fueled by fossil fuels. None of this could exist without fossil fuels. I don't even talk about, you know, every, every aspect of this. I look down on all the cars driving along. Not that many actually. Broadway looks deserted. Anyway, um, fossil fuels and yeah, maybe the planet's getting warmer, but you're not going to fix anything. You're definitely going to make things worse by criminalizing fossil fuels, by making fossil fuel production evil and portraying it as such. The consequence of that is less production will happen. Prices will go up. So if you really want them to go down, reverse course. Biden should come out with a speech saying, I made a mistake. I demonized the fossil fuel industry. I'm sorry. It's, um, it's time to, uh, time to reverse course. I'm going to approve, open up federal lands to drilling. I'm going to, I'm going to, you know, open up a new error for American oil production off, off the, off the, off the coast, the Atlantic, Pacific, up in Alaska, all over the United States. And, um, natural gas, oil, you can frack, as long as you're not violating people, other people's property rights, go for it. And, and, um, prices would come down tomorrow. They'd come down immediately because everybody would know that future prices would be low. OPEC, you know, the cartel run by Saudi Arabia would be panicking. The Russians would be hysteric. You want to, you want to really hurt the Russian economy? Drill baby drill. That'll do it as much as any weapons you sent to Ukraine. Just free up the energy market in the United States. So don't do it and don't defeat the Russians. Do it in order to benefit the Americans. But the consequence of that is going to be massive collapse of the Russian economy, which is collapsing anyway, but this will accelerate it and, and, and destroy it because it's an economy based almost completely on the sale of fossil fuels. And we, the United States is holding the price high artificially because we have a, a government in power that is anti progress, anti economic growth, anti fossil fuels. And guess what? This is the consequence. All right. Let's see. So yeah, I mean, let's say you could pass a windfall profit tax and let's say you started taxing windfall profits. What would happen when all prices go up or down? Well, they, you know, they certainly would go down. They certainly wouldn't encourage all companies to invest the money. You know, all you would get is a, is, is another unjust massive redistribution of wealth. And by the way, windfall profit taxes have existed in the United States. It's not new. You know, and again, I hate to make the equivalency, but it's not only Democrats that advocate for windfall profit taxes. Republicans, when they empower, often advocate for them when prices go too high of oil and they want to punish the oil companies and they want to send a message and they want to, whatever. It's political theater. It's bad economics. It's bad policy. It's bad political theater. And you know, the nice thing is the Democrats are going to pay the price for it next week. I wish that paying a price for the Democrats meant something other than Republicans winning, but I guess we have a two-party system. And if the Democrats are going to suffer, the Republicans are going to gain. So we're going to have to suffer through the Republicans actually gaining, but Democrats deserve it. Just like Trump deserved to win. In this case, the Democrats deserve to suffer the consequence of inflation, which for the most part, not exclusively for the most part, they're responsible for partially because of their energy policies. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to youronbookshow.com slash support, by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those, any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content. And of course, subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. 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