I'll Take "Media Follies" For 1000, Alex

Alex: "The degree to which one should always take the mainstream media."

Jeopardy challenger: "What is with a grain of salt?"

Alex: "Correct!"

Okay, forgive me for trying to shake up my blog posts a bit. After all, it's not too likely you'll hear this exchange on America's favorite quiz show anytime soon. But I got a kick out of a local D.C. news report last night while I was killing time over a beer waiting for my meeting at the American Enterprise Institute.

A reporter was planted in front of an area gas station commenting on how great it is that gas has fallen to $2.49 a gallon, at that particular station at least. And the caption at the bottom of the screen that read "CHEAP GAS" was - pardon the expression - priceless.

My first reaction was that these people apparently don't realize that only a year ago $2.49 would have been considered anything but "cheap." Considering the fact that gas at the Wawa up the street from my office here in good ol' southern Maryland currently goes for $2.49 a gallon, I'm going to assume that our prices weren't much different than those outside the District last year. And last year we were paying around $1.89 a gallon. So, if the price of gas suddenly jumped 60 cents last year - especially absent sudden natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, which ended up wiping out refineries and injecting volatility into the market this year - I doubt our newscasters would have ignored such a story, not to mention opine that such new prices were indeed "cheap."

What's the point of all this? Well, primarily that prices fluctuate with supply and demand, and perhaps more important, that such perceptions about prices are often relative when compared to continually changing events. Above all, it's wise to remember that economist Thomas Sowell continually warns against government controls aimed at limiting the prices that companies sometimes have to increase to offset their own rising costs by cautioning: Prices are not costs.

Just as surely as salt is not pepper.