Submitted by John Rosen, Aug 30, 2008 10:12

As one who is old enough to have wasted countless hours sitting in gas lines during the Seventies, it seems that a (though certainly not not the) key difference between the current economy and that of the Seventies is exactly that: There are no gas lines this time. I recall that the U. S. (with Federal government-imposed price controls) had gas lines in the Seventies while Europe (with no price controls) had none. Gas at $4.20 per gallon is infinitely better than NO GAS at $2.50. "NO GAS," by the way, is what the sign said for months at my local Amoco station in those long-ago days. (Amoco doesn't exist anymore, having been taken out when oil dropped to $10, a reflection of the natural cyclicality of commodities markets…but I digress.) The key point – and the important consumer difference between now and the Seventies – is that no one is wasting hours (yes, hours) per day simply sipping a soft drink in the gas line that is snaking around three blocks of their neighborhood. To emphasize the point: when government doesn't step in to try to "solve the problem," or "help out suffering consumers," or "achieve energy independence," or some such excuse for legislative and judicial meddling, perhaps, just perhaps, individual businesses and consumers simply find a way to adapt to higher prices without tipping the economy into a full-blown recession. Put another way, perhaps, just perhaps, what really caused the recessions of the Seventies was NOT high gas prices, but our government's response to them: price controls, leading to horrible shortages, wasting billions of person-hours in gas lines. How many of Safeway's and Wal-Mart's and GM's trucks were simply idling in lines, generating carbon emissions, rather than revenue? In addition to the direct cost of the wasted person-hours multiplied across millions of businesses there was, of course, the psychological impact of consumers wasting hours in gas lines. Consumers who are time-pressed because they spent two hours at the local Exxon station have neither the time nor the optimism to head out to the mall and start shopping. Instead, they might well go home, turn on the TV, and watch some pundit declare that high gas prices (not gas lines) have driven the economy into a ditch.

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