Joe Biden is not good at being president. The reasons for this are as numerous as the day is long, but the most recent example involves his administration’s approach to energy policy. “Approach” is being pretty generous, as it’s more akin to a continuous string of pratfalls a la Buster Keaton.
Since taking office, Biden and his band of bumblers have taken every action possible to crush American energy independence. From killing the Keystone XL pipeline to canceling oil leasing in Alaska and on federal land, in addition to increasing idiotic fuel-mileage standards and ludicrously invoking the Endangered Species Act, Biden has undone years of progress toward American energy sufficiency in a matter of mere months. Before the pandemic, the United States had become the world’s largest oil producer. Now, Biden has reduced the greatest country on Earth to Oliver Twist: begging the OPEC oil cartel, “Please, sirs, can we have some more?”
For more than six decades, OPEC, the cartel of a rotating handful of North African and Middle Eastern nations on historically oil-rich lands, has kept the price of oil artificially high by each of its member states agreeing to supply a constricted amount of oil into global markets. Although the demand shock of the pandemic led to a 2020 standoff between Saudi Arabia and Russia drove oil futures into the negative last year, OPEC has long succeeded at holding global consumers hostage.
The supply quota strategy of cartels is nothing new, and if anything, OPEC is the rare company capable of profiting off of its orchestrated oligopoly. In both ancient and medieval times, guilds representing merchants or artisans set prices. The ancient Egyptian pharaohs, after taking control of production from the farmers of the Nile delta, created what could more or less be described as a cartel for trading opium. Since they were the head of state, however, it doesn’t really count. Also, they just happened to be addicted to the stuff.
The British East India Company, which was chartered at the beginning of the 17th century by Queen Elizabeth I, was technically a joint-stock company, in the corporate model of contemporary publicly traded companies. But if you ask me, that’s just semantics. Similar to the pharaohs before them, the East India Company also monopolized the opium market, operating much like the cocaine cartels in the Western Hemisphere today.
I’m not sure if they were as addicted to smoking the stuff as Cleopatra & Co., but the British sure were addicted to selling it. And they were quite good at it, too: At its peak, the company was “essentially the de facto emperor of large portions of India,” explained Yale University sociology professor Emily Erikson. The East India Company loved selling opium so much that it precipitated a war with the Chinese Empire in 1839 just to continue the drug trade.
Throughout history, a good cartel — well, an effective cartel, I should say — has by brains or brawn needed to shoulder out the competition and corner the market. Again, the British East India Company forced the Chinese Empire to go to war over its trade — and won Hong Kong from it as a result! Biden, on the other hand, is apparently happy to do an oil cartel’s work for it.
