Oil prices and the liberal cure

Ronald Reagan decontrolled oil prices after becoming president and the liberals reacted as one might imagine they would.  They were outraged:

 Liberals reaction to Reagan's decontrol of oil prices, executed on his first day in office:

The conventional wisdom was that oil prices would surely head higher as a result of Reagan's move. Democrats and liberal interest groups seemed to compete with each other for the most fulsome expression of economic illiteracy. In the annals of public policy prognostication it is difficult to find such a wide assembly of wrongheadedness. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio said took to the Senate floor the next day to predict that "we will see $1.50 gas this spring, and maybe before. And it is just a matter of time until the oil companies and their associates, the OPEC nations, will be driving gasoline pump prices up to $2 a gallon." Sen. Don Riegle of Michigan said that "It will hurt our people within a matter of days." Sen. Dale Bumpers of Arkansas had previously predicted that "without rationing, gasoline will soon go to $3 a gallon," and now added that "Decontrol is designed to see how much we can squeeze out of the American people before they take to the streets." Maine's Sen. George Mitchell said "Every citizen and every family will find their living standards reduced by this decision." Democratic Congressman Ed Markey said "I believe that decontrol as a cure will prove to be worse than the disease of oil addiction." A Naderite advocacy group predicted that oil prices might go as high as $870 a barrel "under assumptions which many experts believe are realistic." Instead oil prices started falling almost immediately; from an average high of $1.41 in February 1981, pump prices fell steadily to a national average of 89 cents a gallon in the spring of 1986. Oil imports from OPEC fell by 2 million barrels a day by the end of 1982.

What more can one say. These people are socialists.