While hard times have been known to create strange alliances, it's still hard to believe that a gaggle of airline CEOs is raising its collective voice in a call for more regulation.

One can almost see this group of suits onstage, linking white-shirted arms to sing "We Are the World."

Of course, regulation is a lot easier to stomach when you're trying to inflict it on someone else. In this case, a dozen airline bosses, including Delta CEO Richard Anderson, have signed a letter urging fliers to turn their wrath away from overbooked flights and lost luggage and instead aim it at speculators allegedly conspiring to keep oil prices above the clouds.

As the letter puts it, "normal market forces are being dangerously amplified by poorly regulated market speculation."

Of course, the airlines themselves have also been speculating in the oil market, agreeing today to pay certain prices for fuel that they won't actually take delivery on until months from now. This cost-hedging has saved air carriers billions, but also generated losses at times.

The airline honchos argue that there's another difference —- they actually burn lots of the fuel they're speculating in, while pension funds and other institutional investors are merely seeking to make a buck. The former's good, the latter's bad, sayeth the airlines.

That argument should be washed away faster than the dirt that maintenance crews have to power-wash out of jetliner engines.

Yes, investor capital naturally seeks profitable returns, and markets constantly come up with new ways to sate that desire. Famed economist Joseph Schumpeter summed it up well, writing that "the fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers, goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates."

Those "new forms" include new players drawn to commodities markets. Their entry alone doesn't prove they're the big culprits behind rampaging oil prices. Before acting on that claim by airline executives and others, it would be nice to have a little proof that speculation is indeed at fault.

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal regulator of the market for oil and other commodities, is now investigating the impact of speculation on prices. That report, whatever it says, should give us a benchmark from which to judge what's really going on.

Meanwhile, add airline bosses to the growing list of politicians and others who should cool their jets until we have better information.

—- Andre Jackson, for the editorial board (aajackson@ajc.com)