More Gas Taxes!

Jesse:
And now the CEO of Enterprise Rent-A-Car agrees with my earlier series of suggestions and self-congratulatory piffle that we stablize gas prices by raising the gas tax:

It strikes Taylor that if the government were to guarantee a stable gas price of between $3 and $4 per gallon—through a high national gas tax like they have in Europe, for example—it might spur innovation and hasten the shift to electric cars.

This is crucial. It could not be more obvious that we're not going to take this stuff seriously until gas prices are high, and it would help consumers and business and scientists alike to know where prices are going to be.

I justify this intervention into the market on environmental (keep driving down, help us figure out how to solve this problem), social (people probably have better things to obsess over than the price of gas), and economic (help us, instead of someone else, figure out how to solve this problem and ching-ching cash in.

Big, ugly downside? This would probably heavily politicize gas prices, giving unscrupulous governments more levers to tweak. How long until the first allegations that gas prices are being kept artificially lower in Conservative districts?