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 Or that the law of gravity will be repealed to allow water we use to drink and clean to flow up and over mountain ranges absent pumping stations.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!

Good thing the Ponies don't run on fuel

Its never ever a good thing to see carnies and tipping points being mentioned in the same article together. In this case, though, its nothing catastrophic – only the rising price of fuel finally starting to cause a noticeable drag on businesses like airlines, shipping companies and carnival operators. Actually, this term, “tipping point” is one which has seemed to sprout-up in print just in the last two weeks. Article points out that most economists are disbelieving of tipping points as economies react in a more gradual fashion to a variety of factors than the term would suggest.

We’re not sure what our tipping point is with respect to gas prices and driving behavior. Anecdotally speaking though, we will note that this past week filling up the tank on the truck crossed the $60 threshold for the first time and not coincidentally illicited our first verbal “Holy Smokes”… or words to that effect.

Applying some common sense is probably asking too much

Last week, independent truckers staged a loosely organized protest of high fuel prices by pulling their rigs off the road or driving them at slow speeds (Story here). Truckers were hoping this protest might spur the President into action by tapping into the nation’s oil reserves.

From what we understand, the oil reserves are for emergency use only and though fuel prices are indeed high, we don’t think this necessarily qualifies as an emergency. But from what we know about “recessions”, its not a matter if you meet the technical definition of said state but rather that you “feel” as if you are in one.

So our advice to the truckers is that rather than further slowing the economy with this hair-brained “protest”, they might instead petition their lawmakers to stabilize the fuel market by putting a few more holes in the ground.

Honest to g#d… While we all sit around patiently waiting for the inevitable starving of the world’s poor so that our entire economy can rest in the hands of some Iowan farmers or that day when we can roll big rigs down the interstates bristling with solar-electro-catalytic laser panels, would it be too much to ask to use what’s sitting directly beneath our feet?