[@Vilageidiotx]
[quote]The article can be broken down into two major points: That people who own businesses don't like paying taxes, and that businesses in fact pay taxes. The idea that this is ruinous to the economy is taken for granted and at no point supported by really anything meaningful.[/quote]

Fun-fact: even Adam Smith supports the idea that taxing a product is ultimately a benefit for the entire economy.

Eat shit political economists, your Jesus has abandoned you.

[quote]And if your don't believe a pricing out scenario can happen, then I only need point you to the most recent use of this tactic. Last year the American oil industry was booming. American oil pays higher wages than third world oil, and their methods are more complicated due to the location of American drilling sites. Third-world oil producing companies responded last year by dropping prices dramatically. This is why, during the holidays, prices were fucking amazing. The result was catastrophic for the American oil industry, that couldn't compete with the cheapness of foreign oil.[/quote]

An additional point to broaden this is that it wasn't just third-world producers trying to crash the American market as it may also be Saudi Arabia simply wanting to cripple Iran as they're opening up. The Saudis own enough stock in crude that they can easily change the price of oil by making one of two choices: stop now, or keep going.

Saudi Arabia has decided to keep going, flooding the world with excess crude to drop the price of oil below the natural cost of world crude and well below the operating cost of American, Canadian, Russian, or Iranian crude forcing their economies or their industry to start draining faster than a blood bank ran by vampires. The Saudi end-goal would be to smash any future competition and to continue on like the Rockefellers of the world.

This also has a double-effect by undercutting alternative fuels - natural gas, solar power, wind - by closing the price-gap between them and oil and probably stunting progress in those fields by making the prices far more disproportionate than they should be.