For your consideration ...
Well : Let me ask this. If a President stated that he was going to put you out of business, wouldn't you take as much profit as you could get away with while you still could?
Wouldn't matter, what with my super duper golden parachute retirement package. Run me out of business, and I'll still be fine. It's the people that depend on my business that will be the ones suffering the most.
Besides, when we were in a somewhat non-inflationary environment, oil companies had much smaller margins. To price their products as they do now, is to balance out prior losses. It's all about inflation, expansion of the money supply, anyway. They are not gouging the public, but taking advantage of the current economic climate. With the dollar losing more of its perceived value everyday, why not try and make up for it and get as many of those dollars as possible? I would.
Look at the stock market, the DOW, that number, today, 32,732, is representative of where the majority of inflation has gone. Which btw, is due for a serious correction, aka a huge crash. All because the fundamentals have been thrown out the window, and with people earning less and having their purchasing power robbed from them through inflation devaluing the dollar, means holding back on spending except for necessities, which, as things are playing out now, will very soon be reflected in the balance sheets of all these corporations. POP goes the bubble.
If the people are so brain washed from a lifetime of propaganda believing that those pieces of paper with numbers and some silly plastic strip in their wallet is money, then there is far more of a problem there than oil companies charging more.
Also, to put it in a bit of perspective ....... A quarter, 1964 and older, has a silver melt value of $3.48 of fiat currency. Would you look at that. $3.48? Just about the price of a gallon of gas. So in essence a gallon of gas really still only costs .25. But since we did away with our prior sound specie money system and adopted a fiat debt based currency system operated by private bankers, we now pay that $3.48 with currency created out of nothing.
Specie - gold and silver coin = real money
Currency - fiat, by dictate = acting as money