Politician: The huge amounts of money earned by oil companies elicit the suspicion that the regulations designed to prevent collusion need to be tightened. But just the opposite is true. If the regulations designed to prevent collusion are not excessively burdensome, then oil companies will make profits sufficient to motivate the very risky investments associated with exploration that must be made if society is to have adequate oil supplies. But recent data show that the oil industry' s profits are not the highest among all industries. Clearly, the regulatory burden on oil companies has become excessive. The reasoning in the politician's argument is most vulnerable to criticism on the grounds that the argument ['fails to justify its presumption that profits sufficient to motivate very risky investments must be the highest among all industries', 'illicitly draws a general conclusion from a specific example that there is reason to think is atypical', 'fails to justify its presumption that two events that are correlated must also be causally related', 'attacks the character of the oil companies rather than the substance of their conduct']