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BUT nobody is forcing to buy oil (unlike healthcare would be :rolleyes:) so the more prices rise, the demand falls & they've to lower prices to make profits, it's irrelevant what prices they "want" to sell it at, they do NOT stick to their guns, they're made up of self-interested individuals who want to make profits so when prices rise they automatically produce more oil which causes supply to increase & puts downward pressure on prices
Central-planning doesn't work for same reasons, just because they're cartel doesn't mean that they cease to be self-interested individuals, no the don't; people like you who think such planned cartels can work are poster-children for the failed central-planning programs
The fact that neither cartels nor speculators control prices can be realized from the fact that oil was about $150 before the collapse & in a short while it fell to $50, where were these cartels & speculators then? Why didn't they hold the price at $150??? It's simple, the demand just fell through the floor due to weaker outlook & deflating effect
And why are they at ~$100 right now, I mean they're cartels, right? And they can charge whatever they want, right? So why $100, why not $1000? How about $10000? Million? Why aren't they doing that? How about speculators, wouldn't they make a lot of money if it went $million/barrel? So why aren't they doing it?
BECAUSE none of them dictate prices, supply & demand does! Prices are products of supply & demand! The more prices go up, the more lucrative selling becomes which increases supply & pushes prices down!
Cartels exist and they control the markets completely (especially supply and demand).
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To use this method of airframe shock testing in economics engineering, the prices of commodities are shocked, and the public consumer reaction is monitored. The resulting echoes of the economic shock are interpreted theoretically by computers and the psycho-economic structure of the economy is thus discovered. It is by this process that partial differential and difference matrices are discovered that define the family household and make possible its evaluation as an economic industry (dissipative consumer structure).
Then the response of the household to future shocks can be predicted and manipulated, and society becomes a well-regulated animal with its reins under the control of a sophisticated computer-regulated social energy bookkeeping system.
Eventually, every individual element of the structure comes under computer control through a knowledge of personal preferences, such knowledge guaranteed by computer association of consumer preferences (UPC, etc.) with identified consumers (via use of credit card and later a permanent tattooed body number invisible under normal ambient light).
The above quote was written in 1979.