by J.C. Phillips 

Every once in a while, politicians emerge from beneath the bright lights and focus groups to stand naked as it were before the cold stare of the public eye. Such was the case for Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) when during a grilling of oil executives last week, she unveiled her hidden socialist. To the prospect of rising gas prices, the congresswoman remarked, “And guess what this liberal will be all about. This liberal will be about socializing, uh, um…will be about basically taking over, and the government running all of your companies.”

Of course, new liberals have danced around such ambitions for years often feigning righteous indignation at any suggestion that they are closet socialists. To her credit, Waters is at least telling it like it is, though one wishes she had been so passionate an advocate when she voted for the recent farm bill. Congress’ recent $300 billion gift to America’s farmers will result in taxpayers paying still higher prices for their groceries.

But I digress.

Waters has, of course, like many new liberals, cast herself as a populist hero. Oil executives are making huge profits and are therefore evil. The common man suffers because of the increasing prices he pays for gasoline and other petroleum products. Only government can protect the little guy from the big bad corporate wolf. This might explain why her remark passed without so much as a peep from her colleagues in the Congress, major Democratic presidential candidates or the leftist supporters in the mainstream press. Their silence is tacit agreement that they, like Waters, are arrogant enough to insist that sellers of commodities ought not to adjust their prices upward to reflect a growing demand. Like Waters, they believe that only government – a new-liberal, Democratic controlled government – possesses the wisdom to determine how much profit is enough and the moral acuity to confiscate businesses when that standard is breeched. The script may be tired, but it still plays in Poughkeepsie. 

Unfortunately, Waters intends to keep the price of gasoline low, not through increasing supply – Waters and her fellow white knights have routinely rejected legislation permitting tapping new deposits or building new and more efficient refineries. No, Waters will control the price of gasoline through subsidization. The thing about subsidies, of course, is that they do not change the actual cost of a product, just the price the consumer pays. The subsidizer – in this case the government — pays the difference. Then, of course, in order to control increasing demand the subsidizer will resort to rationing. Remember gas lines in the ’70s? That is the Waters populist promise sans make-up. 

Or perhaps Waters shares the vision of our socialist neighbors to the south, Venezuela. Of course, you can’t find milk or eggs in Venezuela but they have the seventh largest oil reserves in the world and they actually drill their oil which is why they can keep the price of gasoline artificially low through subsidy. The people are happy to top off the tanks of their SUVs for what it costs to buy a liter of Coca Cola. The problem is that it has warped their economy. Inflation in Venezuela is 22%. The subsidy has also proven anything but a boon to the poor who are still forced to ride expensive public transportation while the wealthy buy more and more automobiles with which to clog up the streets and dirty the air. 

This vision of a government run America is an intoxicating one to be sure. No one will ever go hungry; no one will ever be sick, homeless, depressed, or lonely or pay more for any product than some bureaucrat in Washington thinks reasonable. Now, if we could just find someone other than the common man to pay for it.