Just last week CNN/Money staff writer Steve Hargreaves listed raising gas prices as #1 of his 6 ways to lower gas prices. This week he continues to ruin Money Magazine's credibility by expanding on his socialist idea.

It seems completely counterintuitive: Raise the gasoline tax to help American commuters.

Motorists are already paying well over $3 a gallon, and there are signs that it's beginning to cut into demand and hurt consumer spending.

But if a big gas tax was levied - like the $1 or $2 tax Europeans have to keep prices permanently over $3 or $4 a gallon - how could that possibly help American consumers?

One argument says a tax would crimp demand, lowering wholesale prices.

"Anybody with any brains has advocated that, but not the politicians." said Fadel Gheit, an energy analyst at the financial services company Oppenheimer.

Economics 101 teaches us about elasticity of demand. That basically means that if price goes up, demand goes down.

What Hargreaves proposes to do is raise prices artificially, to lower prices. The increased price would lower demand, forcing gasoline suppliers to lower their prices in reaction. That much may be true, but the net price remains the same. Whether your paying more in taxes or more for the actual price of the gas, the price at the pump will ultimately remain about the same.

Or so the theory goes. "Anybody with any brains" knows that Americans are prosperous enough to pay the inflated price. Demand may decrease a little bit, but not enough to keep the price down. There are also goods with inelastic demand, meaning that it doesn't matter how much the price is raised the demand will still be there. Gas consumption being more inelastic than elastic means that gas prices would increase and the government would get a much bigger cut.

But isn't that what the socialists want any way? Indeed it is:

Lower wholesale prices, which would mean less profits for oil firms, combined with a higher tax could transfer money from Big Oil to the government, which could then use the cash for public programs.

"Big Oil", by the way is Americans: American companies, American employees, and American stockholders. Hargreaves plans to "transfer money" from Americans to Big Government which can then be doled out through socialist vote-buying programs.

Consumers would have to pay the same amount - or even more than now - but at least that extra cash could be returned to them in some way.

That money is already coming back to Americans, in the form of higher wages, higher dividends, higher stock prices, higher mutual funds prices, higher bank returns, higher 401k returns all of which invest in "Big Oil" to some extent. Whether they know it or not, even non-investors are likely getting some sort of return from "Big Oil". (If they aren't they need only to open an E-trade account to buy whichever Big Oil stock they want.)

This is nothing more than a plan to "transfer money" from highly productive Americans based on their "ability" to non-productive Americans based on their "need". And that is the basic tenant of Communism, which Hargeaves seems to be advocating.

If CNN/Money values their credibility more than their liberal agenda, they should seriously consider removing staff writers like Hargreaves from their payroll.