Energy is too important to be left to businessmen and markets, right? We need people who we really can trust to get things under control.

Like politicians.

I'm looking at Carpe Diem, the blog of Dr Mark J. Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan. He compares prices of gasoline from 1919 to today against price changes of a first class postage stamp.

At four dollars a gallon, today's gasoline price is sixteen times higher than its price in 1919, 25.5 cents. Over the same period, first class postage went from 2 cents to 42 cents, a 21-fold increase.

And postage prices never went down. Only up.

From 1970 to 1980 there was about a 10-fold increase in oil prices. However, by the mid-1980's prices had dropped by two-thirds and remained relatively unchanged for the next 15 years. Now prices are up by six-fold since 2001.

History, particularly near-term history, is not difficult to access. Search newspaper and magazine articles of the late '70s. The headlines were about the "energy crisis." The world was supposedly running out of oil. We were at the alleged beck and call of Arab oil producers who stood at any moment to use the "oil weapon" against us.

Oil companies were being attacked, as they are now, for the amount of money they were making. When prices sharply dropped in the mid-1980s, these same firms had to cut back, lay off folks, and oil towns like Houston went into depression.

Politicians who want to punish firms with a "windfall profits" tax when prices go up don't propose "loss subsidies" when prices go down.

Our real crises occur when we believe those who challenge what makes this country work -- people, markets, and freedom.

Back to Perry's blog. He shows that with the 10-fold increase in oil prices in the '70s, our energy consumption patterns changed dramatically. Today we consume half the energy to produce $1 of output than we did in 1970. We're now twice as energy efficient as we were.

Yes, markets work when we let them.

Think the guys who drill in 10,000 feet of water offshore looking for oil and gas earn too much?

According to a BusinessWeek survey, median compensation for the CEOs of the 12 largest oil firms in 2007 was $15.4 million. The CEO of the largest, ExxonMobil, earned $21.7 million. Top earner was the CEO of Occidental Petroleum at $33.6 million. Continued...