Truth lacking in industry ads

As the Legislature prepares to gavel itself in today for another governor-ordained special session, the oil industry is up to its usual PR shenanigans as it peddles the notion that it is being unfairly targeted as a revenue source by the state.

Current deceptive and self-serving television advertisements whine about the state's excessive proposed 61 percent &#8220tax” on industry. A 61 percent tax? Horrors!

Of course free-thinking people everywhere should be outraged.

But is it really proper to call this a &#8220tax?” After all, it's the price being paid to the state by industry for the use of resources owned by the people of Alaska. As it is with most other commodities, that price should be determined by market forces.

Those forces, as we have pointed out repeatedly in this space in recent months, have determined that the current fair market value paid to host governments by industry is somewhere in the range of 80 to 90 percent of the resource's value. And in unstable areas around the globe - places like Central Asia and the Niger Delta in Western Africa, where social, political and economic climates are far more volatile than Alaska's - industry happily forks over the cash and continues to rake in record profits.

So why it should be any different here, in the relative serenity of Alaska's oil fields?

Industry reps and their shills in government love to trumpet the virtues of capitalism and the free market when talking, for example, about excessive government regulation or the spiraling cost of fuel at the pump. Yet when it comes to fundamental forces like supply and demand determining the value of something to industry, that value gets spun into a tax.

And that's just not right.