Editor’s Note: Jim Pollock is out of the office this week. In his absense, and with the price of gas once again on the rise, we wanted to bring back one of Jim’s columns from last May that tackled the issue. Surprise, surprise, what held true then, still holds true today.

Families used to embark on long summer vacations by car, until an elite team of mathematicians discovered that it’s cheaper to stay home and watch “Rick Steves’ Europe” on television. These days, the only way an American family will even consider a long trip in their automobile is if they can manage to hook it behind a Burlington Northern freight train while the engineer isn’t looking.

The charm of highway travel was already wearing thin, as America gets more and more jaded. Sure, there’s a move by “Our Iowa” magazine to pay homage to the old Burma-Shave signs, and once in a while you get to see someone actually driving a Corvette instead of just waxing it. But mostly it’s a test of your ability to sit still.

Now we’re dealing with $4 gasoline, and, rather than waiting until the last second, we’re living in fear of $5 gas. The people who were wrong about May 21 marking the end of the world – scholars now suspect that the ancient prophets were actually trying to pinpoint the rise and fall of the Dave Clark Five – are obsessed with what might happen when the price hits $6.66.

Despite all this, I’ll bet you would be more than happy to pay $5 a gallon for gasoline. Compared with what you’re shelling out now, it would be a fantastic bargain that would free up cash for things you want but hesitate to buy, like macadamia nuts.

The key is to separate the price listed on the pump from the real price that you pay through the most spectacular money-filtering device ever invented, the U.S. income tax system.

An organization called the International Center for Technology Assessment (ICTA) once gathered up all of the costs of burning gasoline in cars and decided that Americans actually were paying “between $5.60 and $15.14” per gallon.

A bit of a shock, what? Well, brace yourself. That study was done in 1998, when the pump price was a little above $1.

Taking into account the skyrocket rise in gas prices since then, along with the billions of dollars spent in the intervening years to protect our oil supplies, and it’s like burning Dom Perignon to get the kids to soccer practice. Here in 2011, an idling engine is the devil’s playground.

To be realistic, we should note that the ICTA folks threw everything imaginable into the mix, assigning a gas-related cost to items ranging from “aesthetic degradation of cultural sites” to “insurance losses due to automobile-related climate change.” They wanted to figure out how octane ratings affect the self-esteem of third-base coaches, but they ran out of time.

But we certainly have to include the cost of wars and other military deployments when we think about the cost of our fuel. The United States has long spent billions trying to keep oil flowing steadily around the world, and the job has been particularly challenging in recent decades. One could argue that our activities in the Persian Gulf – the liberation of Kuwait, the invasion of Iraq – were in the interest of democracy or self-defense, something along those lines. But that’s like saying you go to fast-food restaurants for the ambience. We really, really crave crude oil.

As oil supplies start to dwindle, you’ll see just how determined we are to keep the spigots open. We’ll start sending gift baskets to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. We’ll ask Hugo Chavez if he’s been working out.

With all of its shale oil, Canada should prepare for some serious wooing. Just last January, when the incoming members of Congress read the U.S. Constitution out loud, historians were surprised to hear a new clause about how much fun it is to sit back and watch a good game of hockey.