Walter E. Williams: Scapegoating speculators

Despite Congress? periodic hauling of weak-kneed oil executives before their committees to charge them with collusion and price gouging, subsequent federal investigationsturn up no evidence to support the charges. Right now oil company executives are getting a bit of a respite as Congress has turned its attention to crude oil speculators, blaming them for high oil prices and calling for tighter control over commodity futures trading.

Let?s look at the futures market and for simplicity use corn futures discussed in my May 28 column titled “Futures Market.” While corn is different from oil, both obey the laws of supply and demand, just as humans are very different from bricks but both obey the laws of gravity.