This man is simply delighted you’re paying $4.40/gallon at the pump.

Eschewing any flowery window dressing to distract us, Thomas Friedman of the NYT can barely contain his glee over what we are currently paying at the pump, so much so that he believes that regardless of what happens to the price of oil in the future, the state should act in way of taxes to keep a permanent “price floor” of $4/gallon.

You see, its all about tough love. When the price of oil is relatively cheap, we act in an amoral fashion and buy gas-guzzling SUVs but when the price of oil shoots up, we behave in a much more ethical and moral fashion and purchase Priuses (just like Friedman!). But since that wacky free market can’t be trusted to keep us in lock-step with Friedman’s world-vision goodness, we’ll simply employ the government to keep us in a perpetual state of automaton-like righteousness.

Its baffling to us that Friedman appears to be completely oblivious to the pervasive negative effect on the economy that high fuel prices have. Its as if Friedman thinks his Prius is going to transport vegetables to market and cattle to the slaughterhouse. Or that the law of gravity will be repealed to allow water we use to drink and clean to flow up and over mountain ranges absent pumping stations. Friedman also believes Santa’s elves will chop down trees by hand and that his sled which is underemployed 364 days of the year will transport the resulting lumber to construction sites for homes we require because we are still needlessly breeding and thus crushing the planet under the weight of our humanity.

The fact that Obama and many in Congress share this naked condescension towards their constituents only bolsters our contention that despite all the “activity” on the Hill regarding our current energy crisis there is a palpable air of unseriousness in all their scratching, clutching, caterwauling and rutting.

UPDATE #1: Big Oil is making such obscene profits from selling gas that Exxon is selling off the 2,200 retails gas stations it owns here in the states. All that jack was piling up in stacks at Exxon headquarters and was becoming a fire hazard... they simply couldn't spend it fast enough on their executives pensions so the only sensible thing to do was to kill that golden goose. Safety first!