I am sufficiently old — and then some, distressingly — to remember 1973. Among the prominent memories of that year were the large international price increases for oil, the long lines at gasoline stations, the handwritten “NO GAS” signs, the five- or 10-gallon purchase limits, the utterly silly license plate odd-even system for determining who would be allowed to get in line on a given day, the favoritism toward contractors, other small business types, and rural areas, the unofficial favoritism toward friends of the station owners, and on and on. Somewhat more hidden were the large misallocations of fuels and sheer waste caused by the metastasizing regulatory apparatus, as well as the other massive dislocations in U.S. energy markets.
Both then and to this day, the lines and distortions were blamed widely on the oil “embargo” imposed by the Arab members of OPEC on the United States, the Netherlands, and a few others: Those consuming nations supposedly were not allowed to buy oil from those producers.
