Actually what they really voted was that no slave could be kept in the commonwealth. . .however shipping them through was fine as long as the slaves didn't have residence or whatever. Slaves could not be kept/owned in NY but is there anything that said slaves couldn't be shipped through NY to other places like the South.
The price of gas should be treated like any other thing that can be bought a capitalist/free-market society and that is strictly applying the Laws of Supply and Demand.
And here's the thing - nowadays Low Supply of gasoline is a rarity in the US. In gas stations there is a computer type device called a Veeder Root that tracks the amount of gas in the reserve tanks. An annoying alarm goes off when the tanks get low. So does that mean it's time to raise the gas price to preserve what's left in the tanks before it all runs out?
No, it's time to make a couple of phone calls(duty of the store manager) so the the fuel tanker can show up, usually same day, to refill the reserves. Even if reserves get low and the alarm goes off and the tanker doesn't appear same day there's no reason to panic. That's because there's still plenty of fuel in the reserves for at least a couple of days until the tanker shows up.
Even in the worst case scenario of the tanker taking way too long, most cities, even small towns, still have another gas station or two.
Overall the problem is oil speculators messing with the prices on the global scale. That needs to be stopped in some way. Make that type of speculation illegal in the US. The other problem is government raising gas taxes or as Milton put it - "Inflation is taxation without representation."
