The demand for oil is going up. The supply is not. And the demand is not particularly elastic; by and large people do not use less oil without major price changes.
So at some point, we are going to be paying more for gasoline than the Europeans do today. The question is: who gets the benefits?
The cost of oil extraction is very low, so there will be a lot of money coming out of the ground. What is a problem is that this is pure profit going to the oil companies, and they have built-in mechanisims to avoid corporate taxes.
A) Corporate taxes are flat, not scaled to cost/profit ratio, even for utilities like gas and electricity.
B) Oil companies have the depletion allowance, which is a real scandal.
C) The US doesn't charge much royalty on local oil, and various interests have guaranteed that royalties abroad are lower than they might otherwise be. (This is why big oil hates Chavez so passionately; he's a major threat to their business model.)
In short: high gas prices in and of themselves are not price gouging. What is highly dubious is who really owns the rights to that oil in the first place.
In fact, I am in favor of high oil prices. Really high oil prices. Ultimately, it's the best way to fight global warming.
So, here are some ideas:
1. Taxes on oil should cover the cost of any military adventure even remotely associated with protecting oil reserves. This is just good economic sense, not to mention moral: those that benefit should pay.
2. Taxes on oil should be tied to any future cap-and-trade premiums for carbon tax. These should not apply only to industry, but to the transportation sector as well.
3. We should support people like Chavez, who want to reform oil profits, in the way that previous reformers have done land reform. Large oil patents are the moral equivalent to the latifunda.
Of course, Billmon says this much better than I ever could, comparing the US to an oil junky, and our foreign policy to that of Asimov's Trantor.