Like starting over: price controls are new again.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: Citings

On January 28, 1981, when freshly sworn-in President Ronald Reagan abruptly lifted federal price controls on gasoline, the No. 1 song in the country was the late. John Lennon's "(Just Like) Starting Over." On September 1, 2005", it was just like starting over all over again, when the state of Hawaii became the first American jurisdiction in a quarter century to adopt the long-discredited policy of placing bureaucrats in charge of petroleum prices.

This wasn't just an isolated case of Island Fever. With Hurricane Katrina disrupting oil flows along the refinery-rich Gulf Coast, unrest in the Middle East throwing access to future reserves in doubt, and demand in the developing world continuing to outpace supply, prices at the pump topped [S.sub.3] a gallon nationwide, giving politicians a unique opportunity to demonstrate their economic ignorance or cynical opportunism.

Legislators in at least four other states are mulling bills like Hawaii's; attorneys general in at least 30 states have made preliminary noises about investigating gas "profiteering"; governors from both major parties have promised to prosecute what Massachusetts Republican Mitt Romney calls "white collar looting"; and President George W. Bush himself has condemned "price gouging." Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) called for a windfall profits tax on oil companies; the...