ISLAND VOICES
Position on gas cap too tepid
By Richard S. Miller
Member of Citizens Against Gasoline Price Gouging and professor of law, emeritus
The Advertiser's March 22 editorial on gasoline caps — yeah, something needs to be done about gasoline price gouging but gas caps won't work and create too many problems; we need a nationwide solution — takes a wussy position that will not get us out of the terrible situation we are now in.
Unfortunately, Hawai'i is a small state and is too far away from other states to prevent local monopolies and oligopolies from gaming the market and raising their profits without regard to any competition. If state agencies, like DBEDT, can't come up with anything but non-solutions, like more "transparency" or teaching drivers not to buy a higher grade of gasoline than they need, then only the Legislature can save Hawai'i consumers from the gas-price-gouging scourge.
The Advertiser argues that there is no logical stopping-place for price caps: "(W)hy not extend them to, say, poi or toilet paper, or real estate?" The short answer is that there seems to be plenty of genuine competition for poi and toilet paper and for most commodities in Hawai'i other than gasoline and health insurance.
As to gasoline, however, U.S. District Judge Susan Mollway in 1997 found, as a fact, that there is an oligopoly at the wholesale level: "(T)he wholesale gasoline market in Hawai'i is highly concentrated."
Where there once was a real estate ownership oligopoly the Legislature boldly stepped in and passed the Land Reform Act, which forced the large landowners to sell the fee ownership of land to the tenants at fair prices. We are all better off for that, and we will all be better off with the proposed gas cap.
The Advertiser also argues that price caps will reinforce the perception that Hawai'i is anti-business. Bull! What might keep business away more than gas-cap regulation is the high cost of living, made worse by the artificially high price of gasoline, highly exaggerated rumors of a lousy school system and Forbes magazine's crazy right-wing political attacks on Hawai'i.
The fact is that Hawai'i, notwithstanding its cost of living (which is now matched on the Mainland by many desirable locations) is widely understood by intelligent people worldwide to be one of the most, if not the most, desirable places in the world to live and work, notwithstanding low salaries and high costs. Gas caps will not change that and might even make it better. Indeed, the wholesale gas cap should even create real competition at the retail level.
