The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 401
a necessity to keeping the markets open, instead of being legislatively closed
due to health and danger concerns. Even the most ardent libertarians understand and accept these measures.
The concern for us, at least for me as a patriotic American, is to insure a safe
and sane American free market. I'm not interested in helping foreign ethanol
producers at the expense of American farmers and producers. There is no benefit to allowing someone else to dump products in America. Domestic ethanol
is already cheaper than gasoline and diesel, and if we want our fuels at the
pump even cheaper then there should be no restrictions on how much ethanol
can be sold at a fueling station.
The free-market restriction we should all be concerned about is that higher level
ethanol-gasoline blends are not allowed at every single service station. Pumps
should be available that allow the consumer to choose whatever blend level
they desire, from E0 to E99, with all the stops along the way. Who is stopping
this from happening? Not the ethanol industry, it's the oil industry.
What's more, it should be illegal for an oil company to impose severe financial
penalties on independently-owned stations for adding in independent fuel options. Let the power of the consumer's purse control the market; make all and
any blend level available; remove the subsidies that have been given to the oil
industry - as they have for more than 100 years - and let the price of gasoline
and diesel reflect their real cost, which might be as high as $15-$20 per gallon.
But, for argument sake, let's say that all import tariffs are removed from foreign
ethanol, at this point the biggest losers wouldn't be domestic ethanol producers,
it would be the oil industry. Cheaper ethanol would make ethanol-gasoline fuels
even cheaper than they are now; they would be more of a competitive threat to
the oil industry. It would force your precious oil industry to lose money, or for
the government to impose greater at-the-pump taxes to quell the oil industry's
complaints. The irony of your solution would be to create more taxes, not less.
The oil industry is the most heavily restricted industry in the world; there is nothing free about it. It's worse than the diamond cartel restrictions because not
everyone needs diamonds on an everyday basis. We can get along without
diamonds, but we can't get along without engine fuels. They have us over a
barrel, pun intended.
To sum up the issues of subsidies and free markets:
