First, courtesy of Slate and Timothy Noah, Congress finally takes on OPEC - a brief excerpt:

Longtime readers of this column may recall my interest in a lawsuit filed in 2000 by Carl and Debbie Prewitt, a married couple who ran a Texaco station in Birmingham, Ala. The Prewitts were naïve enough to think that the United States might care to enforce the Sherman and Clayton antitrust acts against an international conspiracy to fix the price of oil. The conspiracy, which began in 1960 and continues to this day, is called the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC. An appellate judge shut down the Prewitts in 2003, just as another judge had, in a similar lawsuit two decades earlier, shut down the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. Far from taking on OPEC, the U.S. government actually protects OPEC from citizens who try to compensate for the Justice department’s peculiar blind spot. Think about that next time you shell out $60 to fill up your tank.

Meanwhile, via Instapundit, an article in the Libertarian Center, which, in summary, states:

Yet, grading on a global and historical curve, America is a distinctively libertarian country. And despite the best efforts of ideologues on both the left and right, it has grown more libertarian, on the whole, over the past few decades. A grasp of these basic facts is essential to any sound understanding of the country’s recent history and current political muddle.

The author does mention that there are some distinctly non-libertarian leanings in this country, mostly relating to crime, abortion, and “virtue” (think anti-smoking campaigns), but, by and large, the US isn’t divided between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans - most of it is a little of both, taking a milder version of the social liberty offered by the left wing and a milder version of the economic liberty promised by the right wing. That, of course, would be the definition of libertarianism.

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