I'm fairly conscious of the price of gas. My job is exactly (to the tenth of a mile) 30 miles from my house, and so I drive 300 miles a week just to get to work and back. Including all the rest of my driving, that adds up to about a tank of gas a week.

When I moved to North Carolina, gas was 79 cents a gallon. Two weeks ago, it rose from $1.21 (when I drove past a particular station on my way to work) to $1.27 (when I drove past the station at lunch time) to $1.33 (when I drove home). That's some serious price jockeying. Since then, of course, the price has continued to rise to where it sits at about $1.45 a gallon now.

But while I pay pretty close attention to the price of gas, I don't really care about it as far as my wallet goes. I always fill up the tank and I always use the pay-at-the-pump. When my car needs gas, I get it. I pay off my credit card bill at the end of the month, regardless. No worries.

When oil climbs up to $30 a barrel and beyond, I do laugh this haughty, intellectual laugh and say things like "Now we'll get some real action on alternative-fuels in cars." But while the simple gadgetry of fuel cells and hydrogen-electric engines is alluring, I know that as a consumer of 10-year-old cars, it's gonna be one hell of a long time before I experience any of that stuff.

And anyway, it's not like OPEC can keep prices high.

When prices get to where they are, all the oil producing countries hold the line and keep to their quotas for a few months or maybe even a year. And then, as soon as the stupid American consumers have cut demand by putting their SUVs up on blocks and purchased legions of Geo Metros, the price plummets. I mean, it really bottoms out.

A tangential tale: Back when I lived in Clovis, N.M., the cool thing to do if you were in band (speaking oxymoronically) was go to the West Texas U. band camp. Most of the campers were the children of oil boomers from down near Midland and Odessa. There were five junior high band groups and six senior high groups back in 1983, when there was still some boom left. By 1986, the bust was in full swing and band camp numbers had dropped almost in half.

Simply put, at $30 a barrel, oil creates lots of idiot millionaires But only OPEC makes money (and not all that much) at $10 a barrel. So, after 15 years of record-low real (adjusted for inflation, that is) oil prices, OPEC has finally put together a pumping-limit plan that works. For now.

That's the thing. Politicians, who certainly know better, are humping this gas price increase for all it's worth. There's talk of lowering gas taxes (a truly inspired idea--pay a couple of cents less for gas and hundred of dollars more for car repairs as roads fall apart) and also depleting the nation's strategic oil reserves (I'm ambivalent about that, but even such an innocuous move seems silly to me). People are proposing just about every solution in the book, when the government should be considering only one: Do nothing.

Our economic system is based on loosely-regulated free markets. Let the market decide what to do with gas. If we use less gas (and other petroleum products), then a glut will develop on the world market and the prices will fall. This happened in the mid-80s and held up pretty well until every idiot with credit went out and bought a 10 mpg SUV. Did you notice that most of those 70s gas guzzlers hit the junkyard pretty quickly in the economy-conscious early 80s. Yeah, I drove a '76 Pontiac Le Mans well into the 90s, but let me tell you, that "mid-size" dwarfed many minivans. It was the king of the road in more ways than one.

My yellow tank also got about 5 mpg in the city, which was fine when I drove 20 miles a week in college, but when a got a job that required 30 miles of driving a day, I immediately traded that puppy in for a Cavalier (it's okay to laugh).

That was my decision as part of the free market. And remember, this was in the "cheap gas" days of the early '90s, when gas ran about $1.25 a gallon.

That's right. Gas was about $1.25 a gallon back in 1993. I'm not exactly sure, but I think inflation has averaged about 2 percent the last seven years. Maybe it's a little more, but 2 percent is a nice round number. By my calculations, then, that $1.25 gallon of gas should run me about, um, $1.45 today.

By jove, that's about where they are!

It's a well-established fact that the $1 a gallon (or so) gas prices of the last five years were lower than the famous 15 cents a gallon (or 20, or 25) that your parents rhapsodized about. While I hear some earnest folks out there saying "don't forget the poor, they're the ones most hurt by an increase in gas prices," that doesn't wash with me. Yeah, prices are higher, but the recent increase merely brings them back in line with every other consumer good. In fact, when you consider that gas was more than a buck a gallon in 1980--in the days of double-digit inflation--distilled petroleum fuel is still probably astonishingly cheap when compared to other products.

So don't worry about it. Don't let those pundits and politicians pander to you. Tell them to worry about something important, like health care, child care, education or the NCAA tournament. 'Cause we do have lots of things that need some attention. There are a couple of boring dudes running for president, and they shouldn't be spinning the latest gas prices. Make them work for your vote, even if you don't intend to cast it. And if you don't like high gas prices, don't drive your car. That's the only way you can do anything about them.

Jon Worley is still having loads of fun manually manipulating his new (used) car's transmission.