As if on cue after this post from yesterday, Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards is engaging in his usual brand of demagogery (earlier examples here):

Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards says a wave of mergers in the oil industry should be investigated by the Justice Department to see what impact they have had on soaring gasoline prices.
During a campaign stop in Silicon Valley Thursday, Edwards planned to berate the oil industry for “anticompetitive actions” and outline an energy plan he says would reduce oil imports “and get us on a path to be virtually petroleum-free within a generation.”
“Vertically integrated companies like Exxon Mobil own every step of the production process — from extraction to refining to sale at the pump, enabling them to foreclose competition,” says an outline of Edward’s energy plan.

Now, you can peruse the “Economics-Energy Prices” category archive of this blog and find many credible resources that utterly debunk Edwards’ theory regarding the cause of rising gasoline prices. But Andrew Morriss, one of Larry Ribstein’s colleagues at the University of Illinois College of Law, provides this handy SSRN paper in which he cogently explains that governmental interference with gasoline markets has a far larger impact on gasoline prices than anything Exxon Mobil does:

Rising gasoline prices have brought energy issues back to the forefront of public policy debates. Gasoline markets today are the result of almost a hundred years of conflicting regulatory policies, which have left them dangerously fragmented. In this article, I analyze that regulatory history, highlighting the unintended consequences of regulation that have pushed the United States into a series of loosely connected regional markets rather than a broad, deep national market. This fragmentation leaves the American economy is vulnerable to natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and foreign dictators in ways that it need not be. It also produces higher prices for consumers and reduced innovation by refiners.

TigerHawk understands, too.