WSJ.com - Hawaiian Nuts

"The silver lining of this year's rising oil and gas costs has been that politicians have resisted the temptation to impose price controls. A sign of growing economic literacy, we had hoped. But now comes the Hawaiian legislature, whose members have taken one too many spills off their boogie boards.

The Aloha State has just become the first since Jimmy Carter controlled White House thermostats to impose a cap on wholesale gasoline prices, effective September 1. The state's political wizards are offended that gasoline costs more on average in the islands ($2.84 a gallon) compared with the mainland ($2.61), and so are proposing to repeal the law of supply and demand in response. King Canute, please call your Honolulu office.

The specific plan is to fix the Hawaiian price to an index made up of average wholesale prices in certain parts of the U.S. mainland. But why stop there? If low gas prices are desirable, why not dictate that the price will be no more than $1 a gallon, or certainly no more than $2? That would certainly stick it to those alleged "gougers" in the oil industry."