The Magic Pump

When the sun went down Thursday, the price of a gallon of regular gas was $3.41 at most stations in northern Alabama. By morning, the price had soared 14 cents to $3.55. It is a marvel of our times how all those little gas stations and the giant-mega-pump-centers can so rapidly have all that old cheap gas removed and the new more expensive gas put in their tanks in a single night! In fact, there must be some kind of pipeline connecting their several tanks underground to a giant reserve of petroleum somewhere, that just pumps new supplies continually to them. That is fortunate for the amount of labor, tanker trucks and personnel needed to change that fuel out over the course of one single eight-hour period is astounding!

The fuel price increase was attributed to "concerns" over Gustav and a memory of the problems after Katrina and other Gulf Coast hurricanes that disrupted oil supplies in the past. In an instant, the price we pay jumps up four percent. Of course there is no fleet of tanker trucks, no pipeline filled with brand new petroleum connecting all those stores in every little town and hamlet. It is a value system that changes the price at the pump. The only thing that connects the fuel in your car to the gulf coast refineries are the minds of a very few individuals and our technological age.

Fuel pricing is a game, like the value of our fiat currency. The two move in lock step most of the time. Whatever the feeling on the dollar is at that moment, that´s what a dollar is worth. There is no gold backing up our money – only the "good faith and confidence" we have in our American government. But the petroleum is a tangible thing, with value that transcends the make-believe of a fractional reserve banking system. Gas makes us go.

It takes me a year to even be considered for a 4% raise – that is what the cost of living has been increasing over the span of a few years. But oil companies can get that in a moment, at the utterance of a word.

The same is true for a dollar. It changes over night in value. The marvel is that it has any value at all considering it is a note from a government making a promise. But take a good look around. We will believe anything.

Take the one-thousandth of a dollar on all the prices of all the gallons of gas in all the places that sell it. Have you ever seen a place where that 9 was not present? And we always leave off that little superscript when we quote a gas price, don´t we? It just seems to disappear, as if it were not really there at all – just some sort of punctuation or a decoration on all the gas station price signs.

You cannot buy that amount of gas. The least you can buy with cash or check is one penny. And pennies only persist so that you must break another dollar.

It never ever changes – yet the sign makes have to put it on the sign, and the gas stations have to buy that kind of sign that shows it, and all the pumps have to account for it – money to three decimal places. It is an old tax thing – an artifact from a bygone era. It is absurd to think of a government that spends time on minting pennies and accounting for denominations of money that do not even exist. This is the same group in which we are to have "good faith and confidence"?

Oil company profits are at an all time high and no one seems to mind. That´s fine – we could be an oil tycoon someday and sure don´t want to mess up a good thing.

We are told that we Americans want "more fuel efficient vehicles"! Yeah, that´s it. Make ´em buy a new car! They can´t afford the gas anymore so maybe they can just buy a new hybrid!

That will last a while – then there will be some new earthquake and we can start all over again.

Zero-point energy is on the way and the old guys need to round up all the revenue they can get.