The New York Times 's Thomas Friedman, who in recent years has come around to both a passionate environmentalism and a reasonable mistrust of pure-market.... The New York Times's Thomas Friedman, who in recent years has come around to both a passionate environmentalism and a reasonable mistrust of pure-market economies, made some interesting remarks in this morning's column regarding the interconnectiosn among oil use, oil pricing, US consumption, and the enabling of tyranny and terror abroad:

The reason there are so many frustrated and angry people in the Arab-Muslim world, lashing out first at their own governments and secondarily at us--and volunteering for "martyrdom"--is because of the context within which they live their lives. That was best summarized by the U.N.'s Arab Human Development reports as a context dominated by three deficits: a deficit of freedom, a deficit of education and a deficit of women's empowerment. The reason India, with the world's second-largest population of Muslims, has a thriving Muslim minority (albeit with grievances but with no prisoners in Guantánamo Bay) is because of the context of pluralism and democracy it has built at home.

...One of the main reasons the Arab-Muslim world has been so resistant to internally driven political reform is because vast oil reserves allow its regimes to become permanently ensconced in power, by just capturing the oil tap, and then using the money to fund vast security and intelligence networks that quash any popular movement. Look at Iran.

Hence, post-9/11 I advocated that our politicians find sufficient courage to hike gasoline taxes and seriously commit ourselves to developing alternatives to oil. Economists agree that this would ultimately bring down the global price, and slowly deprive these regimes of the sole funding source that allows them to maintain their authoritarian societies. People do not change when we tell them they should; they change when their context tells them they must.

That last line would also apply to Americans, the chief overconsumers of the world, who are in fact consuming the world itself voraciously.

Rationalized fuel taxes would go a long way towards diminishing the tyranny of the car on our society; fuel and highway subsidies have distorted not only the market for transportation mode share but the very physical shape of our cities and countrysides, as well as impoverishing our municipalities as they struggle to accommodate more and more cars and the space they devour.

Driving is every bit as highly subsidized as the most expensive forms of public transit, but unlike public transit, driving reduces property values and covers up land that would otherwise be producing jobs, various tax revenues, and healthy communities--all now scraped away to make room for cars.

No politician would survive it, but a brave few souls wiling to martyr their careers to the future of this country could perhaps pull off an increase in fuel taxes (and parking costs) to help rationalize transport and the shapes of cities in America.

Dare we hope?

Full text of Friedman's article: This I Believe