Energy

When oil prices surge a lot people tend to blame the corporate villains at "Big Oil" for price-gouging. (It's particularly weird when Democrats do this, given how many of them have advocated higher gasoline taxes in the past as part of the solution to weaning America of its oil dependence. I guess their real anger stems not from the high gas prices but that the revenue isn't flowing into government coffers) As the Cato Institute notes, however, the oil industry is incredibly socialist:

Most people do not realize that about 90 percent of the world's liquid oil reserves are controlled by governments or state-owned companies. Exxon Mobil, the world's largest privately owned oil company, owns only 1.08 percent of the world's oil reserves, and the five largest private global oil companies together own only about 4 percent of the world's oil reserves.

...The high price of oil is a direct consequence of artificial supply constraints imposed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and other countries, including the United States, and the incompetence and mismanagement found in most state-owned oil companies. OPEC is an international government cartel made up of Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Libya, Angola, Algeria, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela. These nations control about 77 percent of the world's known liquid crude oil reserves.

Most of these countries and other major oil producers that rely on mainly state-owned companies, such as Russia, have underinvested in exploration and development of new production facilities and mismanaged the ones they have. (If politicians understood the facts and were truthful, they would rant against "greedy" socialists rather than private oil companies.)

The result of all this government intervention is oil that is pushing $100/barrel. Government involvement in the search for alternative energy in the form of biofuels has met with similarly grim results.

But don't worry, John Edwards has a plan.