  The "Hotelling rule" (HR) called to be "the fundamental principle of the
economics of exhaustible resources" has a logical deficiency which was never
paid a sufficient attention to. This deficiency should be taken into account
before attempting to explain discrepancies between the price prediction
provided by the HR and historically observed prices. Our analysis is focused on
the HR in its original form, we do not touch upon other aspects such as varying
extraction costs and other ways of upgrading the original model underlying the
Hotelling rule. We conclude that HR can not be derived from the simple models
as it was claimed, therefore it should be understood as an assumption on its
own, and not as a rule derived from other more basic assumptions.
