“But the state Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection says those deals violate Wisconsin’s Unfair Sales Act, which requires stations to sell gas for about 9.2 percent more than the wholesale price.”

George Orwell, call your office.

This post is related to an earlier post on this blog regarding Uncle Sam forcing a dairy farmer to stop selling milk for less than the Federally mandated price:

The federal milk marketing program requires most milk producers and handlers to set minimum prices on their products and to pool their revenues. It also tries to balance the supply and demand of milk and milk products, which can vary widely from day to day.

Whether that’s actually true, or the milk marketing program is even needed, is debatable, as Hettinga’s success shows. The new law would, in effect, require Hettinga to pay his competitors to stay in business.

I couldn’t agree more with everyone’s comments thus far. This is naked, raw, pure, unadulterated statism.

I found this gem in the online version of Mises’s Omnipotent Government outlining Nazi economics page 222:

1. Capitalism is an unfair system of exploitation. It injures the immense majority for the benefit of a small minority. Private ownership of the means of production hinders the full utilization of natural resources and of technical improvements. Profits and interest are tributes which the masses are forced to pay to a class of idle parasites. Capitalism is the cause of poverty and must result in war.

2. It is therefore the foremost duty of popular government to substitute government control of business for the management of capitalists and
entrepreneurs.

3. Price ceilings and minimum wage rates, whether directly enforced by the administration or indirectly by giving a free hand to trade-unions, are an adequate means for improving the lot of the consumers and permanently raising the standard of living of all wage earners. They are steps on the way toward entirely emancipating the masses (by the final establishment of socialism) from the yoke of capital. (We may note incidentally that Marx in his later years violently opposed these propositions. Present-day Marxism, however, endorses them fully.)

4. Easy money policy, i.e., credit expansion, is a useful method of lightening the burdens imposed by capital upon the masses and making a country more prosperous. It has nothing to do with the periodical recurrence of economic depression. Economic crises are an evil inherent in unhampered
capitalism.

5. All those who deny the foregoing statements and assert that capitalism best serves the masses and that the only effective method of permanently improving the economic conditions of all strata of society is progressive accumulation of new capital are ill-intentioned narrow-minded
apologists of the selfish class interests of the exploiters. A return to laissez faire, free trade, the gold standard, and economic freedom is out of the question. Mankind will fortunately never go back to the ideas and policies of
the nineteenth century and the Victorian age. (Let us note incidentally that both Marxism and trade-unionism have the fairest claim to the epithets “nineteenth-century” and “Victorian.”)

6. The advantage derived from foreign trade lies exclusively in exporting. Imports are bad and should be prevented as much as possible. The happiest situation in which a nation can find itself is where it need not depend on any
imports from abroad. (The “progressives,” it is true, are not enthusiastic about this dogma and sometimes even reject it as a nationalist error;
however, their political acts are thoroughly dictated by it.)

Sound familiar?

Boycotting gas pumps is not enough. We all gotta have gas. And they know it. To get their attention, we should boycott everything else they sell – beer, milk, sandwiches, etc. There are plenty of places to buy these “extras”. Then they will feel it. Lets make it last until prices drop significantly, say to $2 per gallon. Or December, whichever comes first. Make it really hurt. Thanks.