NOW DO HEALTH CARE.

The strong libertarian position on positive rights bestowed by government is that they involve the conscription of others.

In "The Impossibility of Endless, Cheap Gas," a Common Dreams contributor who majored in sociology grasps that point, at least in the special case of energy.  Yes, she starts with the recognition that oil is most likely an exhaustible resource (although the Hotelling price pattern that provides incentives to optimally conserve and to develop backstop technologies has not yet presented itself) she then acknowledges the labor of others.

Access to cheap fuel is not a right. It is a subsidy built on violence, both societal and environmental harm. The price of cheap oil is exploitation and death, including death of children and the destabilization of our climate, which all risk future generations’ viability on Earth. In the face of such consequences, surely we can do better.

It's asking too much for the lady to acknowledge the "exploitation and death" inherent in the mullahs looking the other way while infidel oil transited the Strait of Hormuz while the infidels looked the other way while the mullahs used their oil money to exploit their people and fund gangbangers masquerading as religious nationalists throughout Asia Minor.  It's certainly too much to point out that access to college, or medical services, or Doritos, is no more a right than access to cheap fuel is, nor that such access is also a subsidy built on violence.

Moreover, as we're dealing with a sociologist writing for Common Dreams, the flights of fancy quickly follow.

The only solution to expensive gas is to consume less gas. To be sure, this is a rock and a hard place conundrum. We rely on our vehicles to get to work. Most of our cities lack high bikeability. And, most Americans live paycheck to paycheck and a small increase in the price of gas is too much on an already strained budget. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour has not changed since 2009.

Meanwhile, our federal government has gutted The Environmental Protection Agency, climate change policy, and environmental regulations and the supreme court has developed a shadow docket whose first action was to roll back environmental protections. Our structure is crumbling any semblance of respect for our planet and leaning hard into anthropocentrism, the “humans first” logic that parallels President Donald Trump’s America first faulty logic.

What are the costs of being first? From a sociological viewpoint, increased demands for goods, technological pursuit, militarization, and war without long-term risk assessment and a society overly dependent on consumerism and endless growth needs to be checked. A society unwilling to critically reflect on nor willing to change its self-destructive trajectory is not a sustainable one. Gas prices should reflect their true costs, not only to us, but to our planet and to future generations.

Fine, let's hear it for deprivation.  As far as those gas prices reflecting lost consumption opportunities for future generations, well, that's exactly what the Hotelling price pattern is all about.