Europe

[Beskar]

Well of course thats because Beskar tends to betray a slight thinking that things have a natural price or a bedrock they cannot breach. No object has a natural price only the price somone is willing to pay and the price somone is willing to accept the difference is the profit or loss depending on the situation.

There is a natural price of production. In order to get that oil out of the ground, and in a barrel and delivered to your house, all of that has a cost to it. For sake of argument, lets say this is the Labour cost. Then you got the cost which the company is selling it at, which is generally greater than the labour cost to create what we call "profit". This is the artifical cost to the consumer.

In areas of a virtual cartel such as the Energy Industry. They can set this price to anything they want, and simply get away with it, as it is a fundamental requirement of modern life. So they can easily sell it on for 300% of the labour cost which goes into the bank accounts of shareholders and those at the top of the corperate foodchain at deterimental cost to everyone else. (Other such things are Water supply, etc.)

This is why I am in the line of thinking which believes energy should be a state/community/people/consumer owned infrastructure and should not be in the profitteering hands of the Greed Market. The cost should be the labour cost, plus money needed for research, insurance, and other necessaries to ensure a very healthy system. This would be lower price for the consumers, would be far more efficient, and with funding in areas such as research, you would be getting the best quality, and get access to future-tech(tm) energy supply. Big advantage of this, it cuts out the "middlemen" who are the main ones who line their pockets with the money.