Pray For Our Pastors

SO UN-AMERICAN

The local news radio station has been running a story on how gas just went past the $2.50 per gallon mark in the area. It has been interviewing local drivers about their take on this situation, and many of them have expressed their outrage over the fact that it now takes sixty to seventy dollars to fill up their cars. The reporter notes that some have gone to websites to find where gas is cheapest in their neighborhood, and concludes – finally – with how some resourceful drivers have found ways to minimize the number of trips they make.

At last, a coherent thought. These reports have infuriated me because they belie an American sense of entitlement over cheap gas and thoughtless freedom. We imagine that we deserve cheap gas, and deem it unacceptable that gas has gotten so expensive. Never mind that we still pay much less for our gas than most of the developed world. That what drivers pay for their gas dwarfs what they cost our society in the form of pollution, wear and tear on roads, and time lost to congestion. That we made the decision, individually and corporately, to accept a higher gas bill when we allowed gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles to abide by different fuel economy standards and then bought them in the millions. And that in economic terms, gas is like any other product in the world, in that when its price goes up, people decide either to spend more of their money on it or they make choices to use less of it.

But, you might argue, gas isn’t like goods that are easily replaced, like when coffee goes up so you just buy more tea. “I need to be able to drive; I don’t have any choice.” Perhaps it is easy for me to say this, since I live in a big city and I walk four blocks to work, but there is still choice in travel. You can choose alternate forms of transportation besides the car, or at least residential and vocational options that minimize your use of a car.

But car travel is inseparable from the American way of life, for it empowers us to move on our terms and to live further and further away from one another. To be beholden to a bus schedule or to be denied the opportunity to live in a house with a white picket fence hundreds of miles from a city center seems unseemingly restricting, certainly not the kind of freedom that we Americans pride ourselves in enjoying. Never mind that our individuality is destroying the environment without suitable compensation (we pay too little for our gas compared to what we wreak with our driving). That new developments remote from our urban centers strain our governments’ physical and financial resources (it is expensive to build out public infrastructure to such far-flung places). And that most car trips could actually be eliminated if people gave a second thought to planning ahead and bundling errands (which would happen a lot more if gas was priced correctly and people understood it for the scarce resource it is).

Please understand that I am not a tree-hugging, kumbaya-singing liberal who thinks everyone should live in a commune, share all their possessions, and live off the land. I am a blue-blooded, free-market, fiscal conservative. In fact, my rant against peoples’ attitude towards gas is straight out of my Wharton upbringing, out of my belief in Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” People have it all wrong when they complain about the high price of gas but don’t make any life changes in response. If gas costed more, and/or if people responded to the current price in a more economically rational way, people and communities and governments would work better, better in terms of quality of life, financial efficiency, and environmental stewardship. But it seems that won’t happen, because that would be so un-American.