In The Mailbag

As is typical, I don't have much time to devote to blogging during the workweek. But my traffic spike has led to some interesting e-mail. I'm going to blog about two.

Today we'll do the funny one, without much comment. Tomorrow (or Thursday) I'll do a substantive one (related to this post) about positive externalities and why "it's good for us" isn't a sufficient reason to subsidize things with tax dollars.

Here's the funny one. I've broken this into two paragraphs although the original was only one. I put the break at the point where the tone suddenly and inexplicably changes. The shift hardly needs emphasis, but it's fun. :) (All misspellings are as in the original):

I read your article about the Oreilly Factor's Talking Points. I thought you may be interested to know that over 80% of all gas stations are corporate owned. Since 80% of that market is controlled by large corporations, those corporations set the price. The moms and pops set their prices accordingly to be able to compete. When looking at other markets, moms and pops have traditionally been unable to compete with corporate companies in almost every sector (except gasoline sales). This makes it clear that the corporate gasoline venders are making huge profits when the moms and pops are able to exist in the same market with the giants.

Maybe you should go and take an economics class you retard. Orielly's researchers are the pros you little shit stain. You are obviously just another contrarian who will say anything to defend an ideology. You are so politically whipped that it is mezmerizing. To think that grown men could have their common sense clouded by a political ideology makes me sick! Go back to your stone slave! You captain of giz-lickery you!

There's nothing to say about the second paragraph. As for the first one, I have a counterexample.

There's a chain of independently-owned gasoline stations in my area. Or rather, there was. The person who owns them, Dwight Estby, remarked in the newspaper that he was losing money and unable to compete with the oil-company-affiliated stores because their costs of acquiring gasoline were lower. He is now converting his stations to be oil-company-affiliated.

However, gasoline station profits under normal circumstances are entirely beside the point. O'Reilly was ranting about alleged price gouging after a disaster. And he still needs to learn how markets work.