Gaseous.

AND we thought the GOP was the party of free markets. Not when it comes to energy policy. We've heard Denny Hastert and Bill Frist demanding an investigation of potential oil-industry "price gouging"; Arlen Specter singing the praises of "windfall taxes" on oil companies; and even President Bush promising to look for "illegal manipulation or cheating related to the current gasoline prices."

While such demagoguery probably isn't a bad way to score political points, it makes the GOP look either deeply cynical or economically illiterate. There's this thing called "supply and demand." Gas is expensive right now because supply disruptions (and fears of future supply disruptions) have caused a spike in crude-oil prices. Oil-company "gouging" has precisely nothing to do with this phenomenon; in fact, it doesn't even exist. The oil and gas sectors' current profit margins are comparable to those of other industries, hovering slightly below 10 percent. Historically, they have actually been lower than profit margins in the economy at large. Slapping a "windfall tax" on oil companies now would amount to telling them that they must suffer losses during lean years but can't make up for them in fatter ones.

That's unfair, but it's also bad policy. Oil companies are willing to make the huge capital investments associated with exploration and drilling because they have a reasonable expectation that the market will reward them. Diminish that expectation and you diminish the amount of oil flowing from U.S.-owned wells. Then we're back to that whole "supply and demand" thing: Supply goes down, price goes up. This isn't just theory; it's exactly what happened when lawmakers meddled in energy markets during the 1970s.

Only slightly less absurd is the idea of a federal rebate of $100 to every taxpayer. (Where will this money come from, if not taxpayers?) And raising fuel-economy standards for SUVs--which is also being proposed--would simply force consumers to drive smaller, less safe cars while doing nothing to address the supply problems that keep oil expensive.

If Congress really wanted to help, it could start by lifting its protectionist tariffs on ethanol, a gasoline additive. Ethanol could be imported cheaply from Brazil and other cane-growing countries, but Congress has preferred to keep it expensive to favor Midwestern corn-growers, from whose crops it is also made. Congress could boost domestic supply by allowing drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and exploration on the continental shelves off the coasts, and by streamlining the onerous regulatory process that has kept the U.S. from building a single new refinery since 1976. And it could reduce the number of city-specific requirements for gasoline blends, which make us vulnerable to price spikes, since a shortage in one city can't be offset by shipping in gas from another city.

None of these things would give voters that special frisson of hearing politicians beat up on an unpopular industry. But they would have the virtue of making gasoline cheaper over the long term. We suspect that's something voters would like even more.