So, the shortages and long lines were blamed on American oil-producers. They are unable to do so because they have no idea that only political control over prices, and not private owners and producers of oil and gas, create shortages and long lines. The major disaster of price controls and windfall profits taxes, of course, is the abandonment of the sanctity of private property. But the secondary disaster is that the economic situation always becomes worse as a result of the political intervention. People do not realize that prices are simply the market's method of providing signals in the same way that a thermometer uses temperature to provide signals.
High prices are simply the market's way of telling people to produce more and consume less.
But rather than permit the signals to guide the actions of producers and consumers, the American people pressure their rulers to break the thermometer. Rather than cope with the bad news which the messenger has brought, people instead choose to kill him. Only when the time comes when people stop believing that they have a right to take away what belongs to someone else. There are fewer more destructive forces than the belief that it is acceptable to covet and steal that which belongs to another as long as it is done through the political process. Whether it involves a person's income, his occupational pursuits, his goods and services, or his trading decisions, the succumbing to the urge to take from those who have more will always result in the impoverishment or destruction of the people of a nation regardless of whether they are Romans, British, Soviet, Chinese, Cubans, and, yes, even Americans.