For the past four years I have practiced as an Independent Petroleum Landman. For those of you who do not know what that is, I am employed by “Big Oil” through brokers to do research on who owns the rights to minerals in areas of interest for domestic oil or gas production. We make great money when exploration is up. When it is down we live on savings. Unlike the unionized GM workers, we have no health benefits, no disability insurance, no paid days off, no sick leave, no Family Leave Act, no unemployment insurance, no employer contribution to our tax burden. Most devastatingly, we have no Washington Elites crying the blues for us when our business takes a downturn thanks to the utter mismanagement and atrocious interference of the federal government.

While unionized GM workers are threatened with job loss due to their own penchant for ever higher compensation and ever lower productivity, we are threatened with job loss due to third party constraints and a propagandized demonization of the people who provide our daily bread. No one is on the news slandering the people who sell milk for $3.55 a gallon, despite the fact that producing milk requires hooking a placid bovine teat into a sucker machine. Ironically when gas, the production of which requires literally billions of dollars in capital risk, hits that price it is some atrocity perpetrated on the common man. 

While the Congress throws money at a failing car company that has proven its inability to provide a product for which people are willing to pay a profitable price; while Obama shows off the solar panel company (co-owned by all whopping fifty-some employees) he will be slathering with federal largesse, thousands of people like my husband and I are wishing we could just go back to work providing a product the nation already uses for a company capable of making a profit; a company that has never taken a bailout. 

Am I asking for the government to favor me? No. I am asking the government to get the hell out of the business of dictating to the people by controlling the market. Now I know when someone hears you say “the market” they see it as something so impersonal. Really it is the most personal of all the methods of allocating the resources of our country. What is the market but everyone in the nation deciding personally whether they, for example, want a house covered in solar panels or a gas line?  I am not asking for favorable treatment of my industry, I am asking the government to not use my money, and that of thousands of citizens in my industry, to set up an unfair advantage against us. Stop banning drilling in wastelands. Stop taxing the gas we supply into the stratosphere. Stop dumping our money into a competitor’s trade that has spent four decades proving how untenable it is in an open market.

One of the great problems with government interference in the marketplace is that is promotes unpredictability. When I entered this business with my husband, we knew that gas and heating oil were things the country needed. We knew that the companies we chose to work for would be necessary for a long time to come, especially if anyone ever wised up and let us produce all of our energy here on U.S. soil rather than importing from terrorism sponsor nations. We knew that the U.S. has far more reserves than we could use up even in the next century. We understood that even if reserves in our local area started to dry up we would know within the petroleum industry far in advance and could make adjustments to a new career with plenty of time to spare.

What we could not predict, of course, was a regime so hostile to wealth creation and in particular “Big Oil.” On the free market of course, our job is as valuable a commodity as ever. In the market that has been artificially restrained by the social-engineering junta now controlling D.C. we are useless. 

Senator Vitter of our neighbor-state, Louisiana, has proposed a zero-cost stimulus. Instead of throwing billions and trillions of taxpayer dollars at industries that are failing, just let a successful industry be unfettered. Let “Big Oil” go about its business providing an essential product at a reasonable price while it employs hundreds of thousands of Americans who do not want a handout, we just want to work.

I never write for personal gain, but this once I am asking anyone who is willing, to call Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Senator Vitter and your own Representatives. Tell them you support this bill which will cost the taxpayers nothing, put hundreds of thousands of people back to work, and make your heat, gas and pretty much everything you buy that requires transportation or energy cheaper.

Pelosi:   202-225-0100

Reid:    202-224-3542

Vitter:  202-224-4623