You're drawing concusions that don't reflect reality; The market regulates itself to a large degree. OPEC keeps oil prices high, but not too high because excessively high prices encourage alternative fuel research - really, if the US and Europe (but mostly the US) made a serious effort to move to fuel cells, the Saudies would be out of business. Also, not selling oil means that OPEC members don't make any money.

Now of course, the US Government's responsibility is to look out for it's people's interest, and I'm sure that they make sure to do what they can to encourage OPEC to keep prices down, but in the end America really has no say. We just can't produce enough oil to effect the market. Russia on the other hand could very well be able to challange OPEC once it's oilfields are fully explored. Realisticly, every government's responsibility is to make sure it's people and business do well, and I don't blame any country for that.

But the real underlying fact is that higher oil prices hurt the US economy. We're the world's largest consumer of oil and have very small oil reserves, that means we have to buy it and that means that higher oil prices take a slice out of every American citizen and company's profits.

[Edited by Raskolnikov on 02-08-2003 at 05:42 PM]