Are you morally outraged by the high price of gasoline and looking for a scapegoat? Don't calm yourself down with an economic analysis of how the high price signals (temporarily) greater scarcity, rations demand and encourages supply. No, stay mad. In an op-ed piece in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch today, Senator Richard Durbin (D-Illinois) not only eggs you on, he tells you whom to blame:

But don't blame only the hurricanes or Saudi sheiks for the outrageous fuel prices. The biggest culprit is the greed of Big Oil.

Durbin’s evidence: oil companies made record profits last quarter. I guess that clinches it -- after all, how could we explain an increase in profits without an increase in greed? (Durbin doesn’t mention it, but I suppose he must also believe that the drop in local gasoline prices from a peak of $2.99 to the current level of about $2.40 reflects a 20% drop in greed. Or maybe, as Russ Roberts suggests, the suppliers have simply forgotten how to gouge?) Why analyze supply and demand factors when “greed” provides a much simpler and more emotionally satisfying theory?

Durbin wants a “windfall profits tax” in order to “punish the profiteers” and insure that oil companies “will be discouraged from gouging consumers”. Some of the tax revenue, he proposes, will be used “to provide financial incentives to auto makers to make more fuel-efficient vehicles”. So let me get this straight: although higher gasoline prices give consumers an incentive to pay more for fuel-efficient cars, and thereby provide auto makers with a financial incentive to produce such cars, we can’t do it that way. We need to put government in the middle to siphon off an arbitrarily defined “windfall” component of higher gas prices and dole the revenue out as artificial subsidies to auto makers.

In its print edition, the Post-Dispatch quotes Winston Churchill making a telling rejoinder to Durbin's type of outrage: “It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider the real vice is making losses.”