The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Introduction
• Part 1: Rights, Property, and Markets
• Property Or “property Rights”? *
• “design Faults” In Locke’s Theory of Property Taint Ownership With Guilt *
• Is Ownership a Myth? *
• How to Get a Free Lunch? Just Apply For It *
• The Problem of Contract Enforcement *
• The Public Goods Dilemma *
• Trying the Free Market *
• The Statist Legacy *
• Part 2: The Common Sense of Non-economics
• The Yakoubovich Syndrome, Or Lies, Damn Lies, and Economic Policy *
• Winning Policy Battles But Losing the War Against Economic Realities *
• Paying Ourselves More of Their Money *
• The Doctrine of “unequal Exchange” the Last Refuge of Modern Socialism? *
• Corporate Managers Are They Going to Kill Capitalism? *
• When the Economy Needs Morals *
• The Political Economy of Force-feeding *
• Hostile to Whom? *
• Mannesmann’s Courtesy Could Prove Rare *
• Part 3: French and Russian Tragicomedies
• Can Putin Build a Real Economy From Oil and Rigor? *
• Russia and the New Europe Growing Apart *
• Russia Hopping Along On Clay Feet *
• The French Tragicomedy *
• How the French “social Model” Could Self-destruct *
• A Little Bit of History Repeating *
• There Is No French Exception *
• The Hobbling of Private France *
• Part 4: The Capitalism They Hate
• The Capitalism They Hate *
• Striving to Get Richer and Poorer *
• “bread and Circuses” In the Modern Welfare State *
• Who Minds the Gap? *
• Float Or Sink? the Millstone of the “social Market” In Germany *
• How Germany and France, the Sick Men of Europe, Torture Themselves *
• Shall We Borrow From the Children? *
• Low Pay *
• Freedom to Strike Or Right to Strike? *
• Part 5: Creating Unemployment
• Stamp Your Feet and Demand a Fair Deal *
• Paternalism and Employment *
• The Things Labor Unions Are Up to *
• The Instability of the Welfare State *
• Some Bad News Could Be Good News *
• Built-in Unemployment Social Protection Costs More Than It Is Worth *
• Let ’s Throw This Model Away *
• How to Stifle Employment By “social Protection” *
• Workable Alternatives *
• A Tale of Two Models *
• A Vicious Circle of Social Kindness *
• Part 6: The Future of Europe
• The Economic Consequences of a United States of Europe *
• A Giant Free-trade Area Or a Political Counterweight to America? *
• European Crosscurrents and the Federalist Drift *
• How Confederacy Could Turn Into a Federal Superstate *
• Majority Rule By Any Other Name *
• What Now For “europe”? Why the People Failed Their Masters *
• Free-riding On the Euro *
• Some Democratic Economics *
• The Soviet Legacy *
• A War of Attrition Between Economic Reality and Political Dreams *
• A Brightening of the Economic Skies Over Brussels? *
• Turkey Knocking On Europe’s Door *
• Turkey and the Eu Club *
• Europe More Secular and More Islamist *
• A Bill of Rights Europe Did Not Need *
• Europe’s Social-democratic “government” *
• Power Corrupts, So Let ’s Make It Less Absolute *
• Part 7: Economics, True and False
• On the Economics of Protecting Employment *
• The Costly Mistake of Ignoring Opportunity Costs *
• “globalization” and Its Critics Mutual Gain Vs. Cloud-cuckoo Land *
• Are High Oil Prices a Form of Exploitation? *
• Immigration What Is the Liberal Stand? *
• More Nonsense On Stilts Mr. Bentham Is At It Again *
• Risk, Value, and Externality *

ARE HIGH OIL PRICES A FORM OF EXPLOITATION?*

No day passes without the news offering a neat economics lesson or two. No tuition fee is payable; only a little thought is needed to absorb the lesson.

It is in the nature of news that much or most of it is bad, for good news is no news and commands neither much airtime nor many column inches. In democracies, where everything ultimately hinges on the popular vote and the polls report almost day by day which way the popular vote would go if it were cast then and there, governments need nerves of steel not to lean the way the polls go, and few governments have nerves of steel, especially when they have election dates to think about. Nondemocracies have other reasons to be concerned about popular discontent.

One recurrent piece of news is about shamelessly high, and rising, oil company profits. Latest broker consensus estimates put the 2005 net earnings of the ten oil majors at over $100 billion. Exxon Mobil alone is expected to earn $31.6 billion, with Royal Dutch Shell, BP, and Chevron each making over $20 billion. Such numbers make the lay public feel dizzy and furious, especially when the moment comes to fill the car’s tank and pay painfully more than one did last time, or three months ago.

Governments find it imperative to be seen to be doing something to get the price down. In Western Europe, between two-thirds and three-quarters of the retail price of gasoline is tax and the easiest way to reduce the price would be to cut the tax. Nearly every government has so far resisted the pressure to do this. Keeping the tax high is the main way to keep European consumption below the American level and put an obstacle in front of the triumphant advance of the “sports utility” behemoths. The remaining way to appease the angry public is to attack oil-company profit margins. Though high profits curb consumption no less than do high taxes, cutting the former does not hurt government revenue, while cutting the latter does.

Last month, both the Austrian and the French governments threatened to put an excess-profit tax on oil-company profits unless they reduce gasoline prices at the pump. (They duly did so to a minor extent, though some of the reduction was due to an easing of crude prices after the International Energy Agency organized a release of 2 million barrels/day from government stocks.) France in addition invited the companies to make greater efforts to develop renewable energy sources.

WASTING RESOURCES ON RENEWABLE ENERGY

Renewable energy deserves a digression. Seven kilometers offshore from where I live on the Channel coast, the French powers-that-be have just given the go-ahead for a German company to build the country’s biggest wind farm, from which twenty-one windmills, tall as forty-story skyscrapers, will deliver 105 megawatts of power into the national grid when the wind blows. To attract the investment, a price equal to 2.2 times the Western European average had to be guaranteed. Although 105 megawatts is about a tenth of the capacity of an average-sized thermal power station, both will have the same initial capital cost.

If oil companies have not so far put more money into renewable energy, it is because, short of a technological miracle, they thought it would be a waste of money. Some miracle of an unexpected kind will very likely occur one day to make some renewable energy source economical, but until it does, responsible oil companies will make haste slowly toward biomass, solar, or wind power beyond the research stage. They can hardly invest in anticipation of technological miracles, and to invest in existing technology is to waste two units of hydrocarbon energy to produce one unit of renewable—as is the case with hydrogen as a fuel and ethanol of vegetable origin.

WILL OIL GO TO 100 DOLLARS A BARREL?

Hydrocarbon reserves are supposed to start running out around 2020-2030, and go to $100 a barrel or more before they do. These conjectures need to be put in perspective.

Crude oil reserves have been supposed to be running out for the last forty years, yet have remained remarkably constant as a multiple of annual production, rising as production rose. There is no guarantee that this will go on being the case indefinitely. But contrary to the somewhat simplistic argument that “like everything else, oil in the ground is a finite quantity,” there is no presumption of the reserves-to-production ratio falling in the foreseeable future. For all we know, it may rise. The headlong progress of seismic search and drilling technology is likely to permit exploration to depths undreamt-of a mere five years ago. After all, over 90 percent of the world’s sea bottoms remain wholly unexplored. Deep drilling in very deep water used to be unthinkable; now it is just very expensive, but as the practice spreads, it will become less expensive.

Currently, about 30 billion barrels of oil a year are taken out of proved reserves and about the same amount put back due to new discoveries and transfers from probable to proved reserves. At an average price of $50 a barrel, this oil will fetch $1.5 trillion, of which $500 billion accrues to OPEC countries and $1 trillion to non-OPEC producers. At a “ballpark” figure for finding costs of $12/barrel, it takes $360 billion to add back the same quantity of oil to the reserves. The difference between the finding cost and the selling price is accounted for by amortization of production installations (in fiscally generous countries, by a depletion allowance as well) by lifting costs, royalties, and taxes, and the upstream profits of the operating companies. Downstream profits are earned from much thinner refining margins. Raising the finding cost by, say, 50 percent to replace reserves would raise the total cost of crude, and of refined products, by much less than 50 percent. There seems to be no good reason for crude to cost $100 for any length of time. If it did, a glut of crude might well follow a few years later.

It is the upstream profit that acts as the tail that wags the dog. Its expected level determines the finding cost the oil company will be willing to incur to replace (or raise) reserves. Until two years ago, the French oil company Total had a policy of not undertaking an exploration-and-development project unless it could at least pay for itself at a world oil price of $10 a barrel. This severe cut-off level would hardly allow spending more than $3 a barrel on finding costs. However, what determines the finding cost that an oil company will be willing to risk is not the expected price of oil, but the expected profit it can make at that price. If the price goes from $50 to $70 or even $100 a barrel but the company is not allowed to make any more money at $100 a barrel than it did at $50, it will not be prepared to incur higher finding costs. The deep ocean bottoms will remain unexplored and known world oil reserves will start to run out. Then will biomass and wind farms come into their own, at a vastly higher cost than would have been necessary if oil company profits had not been threatened with excess profit taxes and publicly pilloried as shameless if not downright criminal.

BUT OUGHT EXPLOITATION NOT TO BE STOPPED?

One lesson to be learned from the high price of oil is that it acts as a lure, inducing oil companies, from Exxon down to the small wildcatter, to explore prospects that did not look economic before, thus to increase probable and proven reserves and—perhaps to their own dismay—get the oil price down again. We call this economics, and it takes cool heads to let it work itself out. Most of the voting public lacks cool heads, and poll-watching politicians cannot afford to stay cool if they want to keep their influence and their seats. They will feel a need to reject the workings of oil economics for being “exploitation of the defenseless consumer” that ought to be stopped. Hence the threat to confiscate “excess” profits—a threat that will discourage some of the very investment that would in time raise oil reserves and deflate the “excess” profits that called it forth.

Behind this easy lesson looms a larger one about labor and capital, wages and profits. A self-correcting mechanism inherent in contractual freedom helps push up low wages because low wages permit high profits and high profits lead to more rapid capital accumulation, hence higher demand for labor. The mechanism works in the opposite direction if high wages squeeze profits and curb capital accumulation.

In his Journeys to England and Ireland1 the sociologist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville was appalled by the miserable living conditions and low wages of workers in early-nineteenth-century English industry and noted that the mill owners were bringing starving men over from Ireland to have a large and docile labor supply and prevent wages from rising.

It is a fact that the Irish were made better off by being brought to work in the Lancashire mills, and it is a fact that the English were flocking to the mill towns because their life as farm laborers was more miserable still than as cotton spinners. Nevertheless, to observers like Marx and Engels, exploitation was flagrant. If it had been stopped by legislative fiat and regulation, capital accumulation would have stopped and the spectacular industrial expansion of England would not have taken place. It was thanks to this expansion that by the latter part of the nineteenth century the English worker was arguably the best paid and generally best off in the world and the Irish immigrant to northwest England and west Scotland could share in this relative prosperity. Without “exploitation” and the corrective mechanism of capital accumulation that it sets off, much of the developing world would still be stuck in utter misery.

[* ]First published by Liberty Fund, Inc., at www.econlib.org on October 3, 2005. Reprinted by permission.

[1. ]Alexis de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland, trans. George Lawrence and K. P. Mayer, ed. J. P. Mayer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958).