I didn't even suggest efficiency. There's just no incentive for an oil company to lower prices or drill for more oil when they're making money just doing the same thing. They're doing exactly what corporations are supposed to do, and what their shareholders are paying them to do - make money. The only problem is, they make money managing a resource that the rest of us depend on.
If they managed something like electricity or water but drew in record profits during a drought or brown-outs, there'd be no economic incentive to get more water or build more power plants. That would be stupid - it would be sinking money and driving down prices. As I said, it's in their interest to make a profit, and if people were doing without water or electricity, but they were still making a huge profit, why on earth would they invest in competing technologies?
I'm not faulting oil corporations. They do what everyone else does. It's just that our livelihood depends on them. But try to imagine what life would be like if all of our doctors and medical folks formed a corporation and priced services way above our heads - and we paid them anyway, because we wanted to continue living. The only way to get them back to earth would be to have competition - someone willing to undercut their prices drastically to force them to keep prices where people could afford them. A government owned competitor would make that possible.
