Thomas Sowell in his classic work on economics described the naive people who fail to do "Second Stage Thinking". What this means is that decisions that are intended to change people’s behaviors inevitably cause unintentioned changes in behavior as well as the intended changes. That is because the intended changes bring about a new reality to which people make further adjustments.
For instance, raising taxes on profits may be intended to increase the amount of money received by the government. But a secondary response to higher taxes is that people abandon investment plans in businesses and industry which chances of being profitable were low in the first place. If increased taxes makes the cost greater, and therefore further decreases the chance of making a profit, the would be investors decide not to talk the risk, or to start the new business somewhere else where the taxes will be less. So, employees that would have been hired for the new business are not hired, they are not paid wages, they do not spend their wages, other businesses do not receive the revenue that their spending would have created, and the overall economy grows less than it would have with the new startups. Consequently, less taxes (rather than more) flow into the government coffers.
This lack of second stage thinking is the reason for the cost of oil and the resulting rising cost for gasoline and everything else that is transported with or made from oil products. Radical environmentalists (anti-capitalistic Marxists in green drag) have control of congress, who stops oil exploration, drilling, and refining for 30 years in order to "save the environment". That is the first stage goal.
But an unintended consequence of this behavior is that the supply is decreased, thus increasing the cost, and also that control of the oil supply is granted to 3rd world nations, many of whom are our enemies, placing our security at risk. And beyond these devastating consequences, the 2nd stage furthermore actually undermines the alleged first stage goal of helping the environment by granting oil production and refining to third world nations whose dictatorial leaders don’t care a wit about the environment and absolutely do not have the protections of the environment built into their collection and refining processes.
And who created this debacle as has been predicted for years as being inevitable given our limits on drilling and production for the last 30 years? Congress . . . and the radical leftist environmentalists to whom the Democrats in Congress have sold their souls and the nation.
Tired of paying more at the pump? Want it to stop? Attack the congressmen in the House and Senate who stop oil drilling and production for their naive, myopic, first stage thinking that cannot see past the money the enviro-Marxists are stuffing into their pockets.