Raise gas prices!

The next time you go to fill up your car, you will probably gulp at the price. "Three bucks a gallon?! It wasn't that long ago that gas was less than a dollar! This is outrageous!"\nSome are already crying foul. Blame has been thrust variously upon a host of scapegoats, such as: President Bush's War on Terror, environmental additives and oil companies, our new favorite villain.\nIn truth, gas prices today aren't insanely high when compared to inflation-adjusted historic figures. We've been spoiled all our lives with a truly blessed period of relative stability in the Middle East and a slew of new oil discoveries. Consider that we make significantly more money than we did a half century ago, so an increase in gas prices doesn't hurt us as much per gallon as it once did. Spreading alarmism about gas prices, at this point, is downright misleading. \nPainting oil companies as the villain du jour only serves as a cheap tool to clear us of any blame. How are their tactics different from other major corporations? They are in the business of making money, and when your business is a resource that has rapidly increasing demand and rapidly decreasing supply, you become extremely profitable. I am not advocating blind acceptance of gas prices. What I suggest is that rather than blind outrage, we ask ourselves just what it is we are paying for.\nNo matter where you sit on the political spectrum, oil runs your life. Trucks bring every commercial product to Target, and you drive there with gas to get it. And because gas matters to you, gas matters to our government. Cries of "No Blood for Oil" might be foolhardy, but no one can deny that the availability of oil has affected American foreign policy significantly. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, Indonesia and Nigeria are huge oil producers and, unsurprisingly, hot spots of diplomatic activity. As Bush so belatedly put it, our "addiction to oil," and more importantly, our addiction to cheap oil, drives our economic growth.\nAll of which brings me to the title of this column: Raise gas prices. For too long, we have lived without understanding what things truly cost. We entered a war thinking that we would never have to sacrifice anything. We've entered a truly obscene state of deficit spending, both in our government and in our personal accounts. We have scoured our earth to suck it dry of its natural resources as quickly as possible.\nWe in America have never tasted the cost of our recklessness. Let this be our penance. How will we ever break ourselves free of our oil addiction if we keep expecting cheap gas? No major advances in technology will come along until we really need them, so let's speed up the process.\nRaise gas prices, raise them significantly, enough that financial strain follows up the ladder of corporations until even the most insulated corporate boardroom feels the pinch. We'll use the revenues to pay down our debt for the war and for research into alternative energy. Until gas prices get so high that we can't stand them, we'll never change our ways.