Hold oil speculators accountable while driving down the prices of crude oil and gasoline

This isn't rocket science. Instead, it's quite literally Economics 101.

Dems, including both Congressional leaders and their party's presidential candidate, Barack Obama, are all about "investigating" the role of "speculators" in the oil futures markets who, they claim, are responsible for driving up the cost of oil and, thus, the cost of gasoline at the pump.

Hearings are being scheduled and held. Legislation has been proposed.

This is worse than useless, because there is already in place a devastatingly efficient mechanism to punish any who've artificially inflated the current price of oil by reckless, collusive, or abusive trading in oil futures. It's a two-step mechanism:

(1) Start in a serious way to do what we can do to both reduce demand (i.e., conserve) and increase supply (i.e., drill and promote alternative energy sources).

(2) Let the market work.

The fundamentals of market economics will then cause the current price of oil to drop. Yes, it will drop today even if the oil whose production that Congress approves now from the outer continental shelf offshore and from the Arctic National Wildlife Preserves won't actually be produced for years yet. When the opportunities are opened up and the commitments are made, the market will indeed react based on its anticipation of future results. Only an economic idiot or a Democratic congressman can't understand that the market is reacting now to the absence of those future opportunities and commitments.

When the price drops, the wagers made by the speculators — who are heavily invested in the success of the do-nothing Democratic Congress — will come up snake-eyes. Those who've speculated will lose their shirts. Their leveraged purchases will bite them with a multi-fold and righteous vengeance. There's no need for hearings, no need for lawsuits, no need for citations or fines or newspaper exposes.

Just the brutal efficiency of the market, which — when permitted to function properly — punishes those who abuse its processes.

We don't know for sure how many market manipulators there are, or who they are, or how much of the current high prices are the result of their manipulation. Nor are we likely to track them down: Crooks hide their tracks, and the difference between a crook and an entrepreneur is often purely a matter of subjective judgment.

The market doesn't care; the market doesn't need tracks. The market passes its relentless judgments automatically, inexorably, and with the closest thing to perfect justice we're likely to see in our lifetimes — if, but only if, it's allowed by government to function normally, i.e., freed from government interference.

You want to purge the market of manipulative speculators? Let the markets work. Permit and encourage conservation to reduce demand; permit and encourage development (both drilling and alternative sources) to increase supply; and drive the price down using basic laws of economics that are more powerful than even Barack Obama on his best day when he's got a full gospel choir and both chambers of Congress singing with him in harmony.