I can't believe Andre is the subject of my post..

I worked with a gentleman named Andre, he was what some might say "straight off the boat". Sent from Russia, with love I'm sure. Andre is a great guy with even better stories. One day we were talking about what Russia is like. He made a comment that I'm not sure I'll ever forget, he said:

Russia has pure capitalism, America is more like social capitalism.

I had never really given it much thought until then, but he was most likely right. And as much as I love capitalism, social capitalism probably isn't a bad thing. (Wow, I can't believe I just said that). However last week an interesting event occurred, that wasn't completely off the radar, but wasn't exactly front page news. I'm speaking of the reported earnings of ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron, which combined were $29Billion. (Full disclosure here, I'm a shareholder of XOM). Many were outraged and immediately there were congressional hearings announced.

Fast forward to Sunday's (10/30/05) Columbus Dispatch's Business section (which I find anemic). The article is titled "Profit won't prompt big oil to boost production". I found this article incredible. The basic premise is: "Big oil companies are screwing is out of everything we own, and are the root of nearly all evil". $29B? I say good for them. What have the done wrong? Price gauging? Really? I agree, $3/gallon isn't pleasant. Tell me you changed your lifestyle significantly because of the cost of a gallon of gas. I'm not talking about carpooling once a week, I'm talking about walking to work or riding a bike 3 days a week. Or considering moving closer to work. And if these things start to happen, then good, the market is figuring itself out. The oil companies will think, "hmm, we're not making a fat profit on $4/gal, we can move to $3.50 and make more money". It can and will happen. And, if you don't want it to happen fine, then let's regulate oil (we just got done de-regulating power didn't we?), but don't blame the oil companies for turning a profit, they are working within the bounds that they were giving, changing the rules of the game midway through simply isn't fair.

Enough of that, what stood out to me in this article was the following quote regarding Charles E. Schumer, Senator, N.Y.:

[Schumer] introduced a bill that would place additional taxes on oil-company profits to help reduce the deficit and pay for hurricane relief

Did I read that right? We're going to tax them more because they made money? I'm offended that anyone would even suggest this. Were they somehow responsible for the hurricanes? No one would ever suggest that, so why exactly should they shoulder more responsibility than any other type of company?

Well, we have a company meeting tomorrow, I hope we don't make too much money, we may be accused of price gauging our customers.

One note: The cost of home heating oil does play into this. And I'm not sure markets should be used to regulate this price. Although this again is not the fault of the energy companies, they are playing by the rules. If in fact this is something that should be regulated, fine, let's regulate it.