The Love

Foreign Policy lists five reasons to love $4 gasoline. And it's true, expensive gas has a lot of public benefits. And if we made gasoline more expensive through, say, higher gas taxes or a carbon tax then not only would we secure the public health, congestion, and environmental benefits of expensive gas but the government would have a good source of revenue with which to mitigate some of the consumer pain. As things stand, gas is expensive (and getting pricier) anyway, but oil companies and oil-exporting nations are reaping a huge share of the benefits.