Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren are not nuts, no, but they are missing something. Spot on the money in fact except for one point:

He is either demanding that we surrender our evaluation of the relative worth of gasoline in favor of his (no thanks), asserting that we are too stupid to know what we want (wrong), or positing that there is some external cost associated with gasoline consumption, not reflected in its price, which leads us to consume more gasoline than is optimal.

The thing is we do know that there are external costs associated with gasoline consumption which are not reflected in its price and thus lead to a higher than optimal consumption. There’s the (hotly disputed, I agree) effect of CO2, or particularates, of NOX, or congestion, of noise…I’d try to add them all up but fortunately it’s already been done:

This paper develops an analytical framework for estimating the second-best optimal gasoline tax, accounting for passenger vehicle externalities and the efficient balance between excise taxes and labor taxes in financing the government’s budget. We estimate the optimal tax for the United States at $1.01/gallon, which is 2.5 times the current rate;

Yes, there are huge public choice and Hayekian information problems with allowing politicians anywhere near these sorts of calculations but I’m not aware of anyone who currently seriously proposes that the gas tax in the US is either just right or too high.

Sigh, if only I were either an economist or a public commentator, I too could join the Pigou Club .