The yoke comment was hyperbole to counterbalance some earlier comments pining about intrusive government etc, that were not yours. Exxon will make as much as they can like any corporation, which is fine. But subsidies and tax breaks - in essence your tax dollars supporting them - should certainly make them open to our scrutiny. And yes, every industry seeks the same advantages from government.GannonFan wrote:But he's right though, I never said that Exxon was suffering under the yoke of an oppressive government. I was only responding to the idea in the thread, and even from you, that Exxon makes too much money. I don't have any problem with the amount of money they make - their profit margins are pretty slim compared to almost any industry out there. Problem is, you can't set up a worldwide business extracting oil from so many different areas and managing that supply chain withouth also putting up massive amounts of money - and really, they get pretty much the same kinds of subsidies that other businesses get - again, it just looks like they get more if you ignore the scale of operation. So the only "yoke" that Big Oil could be suffering under, if you want to use that phrase, could be the threat for government and other interest groups that decide that $10B is too much profit, regardless of what profit margin that represents, and that they should share that wealth.kalm wrote:
I was only partly speaking to Gannon there. If you were a fisherman in Alaska, Exxon is most certainly a victimizer. And considering the size of our military and infrastructure, a big government cannot be helped.
Discussions like these are what make libertarianism more and more attractive.
