What is the cost of gasoline? A: Perpetual war B: Poisoned planet C: Rapid climate change D: Melting polar ice E: Oil spills F: Seven trillion dollars of national debt G: Global rain forests H: Global corporate dominion I: Three dollars J: All the above. Twisted, perverted, ungrateful U.S. consumers are quite sure the answer is I. The only thing of interest to them is the price relative to a year ago. There ought to be some relationship between price, value and cost. What is the value of gasoline? The value of a gallon of gasoline is what you would charge for doing the equivalent amount of work. Push your vehicle and a driver round trip, the same distance a gallon of gasoline would take that vehicle. If you are in good condition, figure an average speed of 2 MPH. A friend told me $3 was too much to pay for a gallon of gasoline and he would charge me $180 to do the same work. What would you charge to push a fully loaded truck or bus six miles up a mountain road? That is the value of gasoline. Now it is time to calculate the premium. The work it would take us hours to do is done by gasoline thirty times faster. This is why a poor man does not push his car to save gasoline. Since driving is a privilege and not a right, why don't we surrender the privilege and all use public transportation? At fifty dollars per gallon, gasoline is cheap and costs us many times that price in so many ways. O.P.E.C. announced a target price of $25 per barrel. If I was King of the U.S., I would add a dollar of tax when it enters the country, for every dollar per gallon crude sells over the target price of sixty cents per gallon. At the moment my tax on 42 gallons would be forty five dollars, which would add more than $1 per gallon at the pumps. All the taxes collected would be spent for planetary damage reversal. If the price of oil rose further, so would my tax. If the price of oil went down my tax would not. Since I am not the King of the U.S., the world will bear all the costs, disproportionately to the contributions any nation has made to the planetary death and destruction. We will all have what we like to believe is cheap gasoline, but not cheap enough. We deserve cheaper and we all deserve a hundred dedicated slaves, tending our every need. Who the hell do we think we are that millions are oppressed in the Middle East so we can have discount gasoline? How many Osamas can we create? If they number less than ten thousand today, I am surprised. America is in the most enviable position in the world. We can have all manner of things we cannot afford. There is not a thing that can happen to us we don't deserve and honest people have told us so. So bring it on I say! Let us pray to be judged as we deserve. Fill up while the price is right and pray for merciful judgment. |
