Should Oil Company be owned by your government instead?

I think Oil company should be owned by Canadian government, i do not think we are in short of oil right now, especially in the area of Middle East and Canada, where oil supply can last for more than 50 years on the pace we are using. There is no reason the oil price should be that high before or after the disaster, the only reason i can think of are the heartless coporation who control the oil price.

And governments have a really great history of running nationalised companies really really well, don’t they?

Well, there is a government owned monopoly in Mexico, PeMex. They don’t advertise the price of the petrol since you can only buy it from there. There is quite literally no other places to buy petrol in the country (at least from the times I’ve been).

There are quite a few government-owned oil companies floating around (Statoil in Norway, Q8 in Kuwait, etc.). Fortunately in my part of the world they have stiff competition from the multinationals which keeps the prices down.
Oh, and FW, if the government charges less than the market price for oil who makes up the difference? General taxation is the usual answer - so you’ll end up subsidising those who drive more than you do.
Secondly, do you have a pension or similar investments? If so, all the profits being made by the “heartless” oil companies are what pay into that. The vast majority of big companies are owned by the pension funds - they aren’t making money to keep the chairmen in cigars, but literally to keep old people fed and housed.

Here in Argentina, YPF (Yacimientos Petrolíferos Federales, Federal Oil Fields) was a state enterprise until 1995, when was privatized, and now, the private capital of YPF, and Repsol (Spain), Joined themselves and are now Repsol-YPF.


An ancient image with a gas pump… In fact, I’ve posted the picture to show the logo when YPF was an state-enterprise, from 1940’s, to 1995.


This was the logo when YPF was an argentine-private enterprise, from 1995 to 2002.


This is the new logo, the Argentine-Spain enterprise, Repsol-YPF.[/img]

the thing is if oil company is owned by government, and government is suppose to work for public. Therefore, most of the profit would be used on public facility, if the oil company is owned by private company, those profit would likely end up on some rich people’s hand and the world would end up being controlled by a few rich indivdual

Say if Australian oil is owned by the government and we are fighting iraq and anti-terrorism in the middle east…would the australian government concentrate a large percentage of all oil companies to fuel tanks, weapons and killing devices for their owne good.
Depending on how the government is wise enough with the control over oil , different countrie governments can and others are war mungering or makes wrong choices.

When has a state-owned company ever made a profit??? You can guarantee that such a nationalised company would end up subsidised out of general taxation.

Bye bye profits, bye bye pension funds, hello messy re-privatisation after a financial black hole develops