The arguments over gas price regulation go on, and the more they do, the more you’re apt to find a certain sharpness to them that goes beyond the mere question of a few cents at the pump. That’s because they’re just a little piece of a far bigger picture.

How much to curb or not to curb the private markets is a question that’s asked continually throughout the Western world and in many spheres of endeavour — banks, airlines, communications — as the public interest clashes with the relentless power of small numbers of huge corporations to influence markets.

This story was juiced up when the Soviet Union collapsed 15 years ago, and the notion of government control of anything fell into disrepute. The opposite creed — bearing such names as Reaganomics, Thatcherism and neo-conservatism — became massively dominant, preaching that free markets will solve everything and keeping them as free as possible from regulation and government control is a holy cause.

But as this view advanced, it carried with it a not-so-subtle deception. Because the whole thing was financed by big business through its think tanks, its influence over politics and whatnot, what was described as free enterprise was in fact mostly enterprise controlled by corporate oligarchies — pretty well the opposite of what classical economics calls the free market.

More recently, this extreme free enterprise, with its greed-is-good underpinnings, hasn’t been looking so good, with spectacular frauds and collapses of the Enron/WorldCom type, the World Bank admitting that the privatizations it has been foisting on the Third World aren’t working, and ever-seamier stories of government-corporate hijinks in Washington.

Anyway, I was contemplating all this while munching my toast and reading the paper a couple of weeks ago when, back in the B Section, a small story nearly yanked the eyeballs out of my head. There was the president of the Nova Scotia Chamber of Commerce, Mike Hill, saying that regulating gas prices in Nova Scotia would kill the “natural market ecosystem.”

Now there’s a perky concept! I presumed that by “natural,” he meant like when the foxes eat the chickens, since the only truly free mechanism in this market is that of the big operators using gas as a loss leader and putting the little guy out of business. Indeed, his next statement confirmed that this is what he meant. “While so-called price wars are certainly rare now, they still exist,” he said. “And regulation would end any possibility of that happening.” In other words, what we all hanker for is a price war, after which we pay more. Are we really that stupid?

He was on a tear, and elsewhere I saw him quoted as saying that if there’s a problem, let the suppliers be investigated under the Competition Act. In other words, let these disappearing small gas guys be happy peasants and wait five years for a complaint to go through the bureaucracy and find nothing — since pricing by the oil majors is set in the international ether, beyond any national government.

The government of Premier John Hamm of Nova Scotia has said it will regulate — or at least do something about — the situation where smaller and mostly rural service stations are closing in droves because they make no money selling gas, because they’re controlled by the majors who, lest we forget, all get their gas at the same refinery in Dartmouth. The game that’s on now is for the friends of big business to generate enough pressure to get it to do nothing, trying to shame small-c conservatives into believing they’re doing dirt to free enterprise by regulating. Hamm has now delayed any action on this issue, saying it needs further study.

At times like this, I usually thumb through my old copy of the Wealth of Nations, the classic 1776 work by Adam Smith that created the science of economics, to remind myself that the free market, the “invisible hand,” functions primarily at the level of the person making a living through his or her labour — the small gas station guys come to mind — and anyone, especially those who “live by profit alone” and those big-business types who rarely meet except to “conspire against the public good,” need to be kept under control by duly elected guardians of that public good.

Do it, Premier Hamm.