Gas prices too high? Congress will solve the problem, by forcing those greedy car manufacturers (who are in bed with Big Oil, you know) to increase their average gas mileage.

Gas prices low? That means people with low-mileage cars will drive more than they otherwise would, polluting our rivers (I think. Rivers might have something to do with it. Okay, oceans then) and keeping us ever more dependent on foreign oil. Which means it’s time for some intervention. Like legislating higher gas mileage.

Gas prices at their historical average? Well, there’s probably something nefarious about that, too.

Let’s go to the helpful folks at AAA for some numbers. AAA, the organization that will replace your flat tire (something any human should be able to do), bring you gas (if you’re dumb enough to run out, which should be practically impossible), give you maps (obsolete c. 2007) and send that godawful monthly magazine with prissy stories about the charming new vineyard taking root (haw!) in Sonoma County. “They make a Cabernet that is to die for. Best enjoyed with roasted squab. Tastings and tours daily.”

Take most of what AAA says with skepticism – they’d have you believe that checking your email at a stoplight is the equivalent of driving over the double yellow with a Stolichnaya bottle balanced on your knee – but we’ll use their estimates.

They claim the average American drives 13,500 miles a year. Meanwhile, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards mandated by federal bureaucrats and legislators require the average passenger car get 30.2 miles per gallon.

(Why they don’t simply legislate that the average car get 10,000 miles per gallon, run on kitchen waste and not be allowed to get into accidents is anyone’s guess.)

Back in the real world, that 30.2 figure is for the current model year. Of course, most of us drive cars from previous years. The mandated average has been constant at 27.5 for the previous two decades, so it’s safe to use that as our bellwether.

That means, grossly simplifying things, that the average driver should use about 447 gallons a year. There are around 250 million cars in the U.S., so that’s 2.7 billion barrels of oil we use every year, you filthy mechanized polluter.

A couple of qualifiers, first being the absurdity of mandating technological “advancement”:

Miles per gallon is easy to measure. Other, more important characteristics of a vehicle – like its ability to withstand fires or protect its occupants in collisions – aren’t so simple to quantify. Nor are they the concern of the particular bureaucrats who implement CAFE standards. Our political betters are collectively self-aware enough to know that they can’t set standards for two disparate variables simultaneously – cars should have at least gas mileage x while having fire retardation y – but that doesn’t stop them from measuring the one variable and enforcing an arbitrary, largely unforceable minimum.

Setting that minimum is a politically palatable way of what can only be described as fixing the market. The result is that auto manufacturers are forbidden from selling as many of their low-mileage vehicles as buyers want. Instead, said manufacturers can only sell a given number relative to the number of high-mileage cars they can sell. Otherwise, the average gas mileage of the cars they sell would decrease. Simply because people, for whatever reason, like to buy cars that burn a lot of gas.

It should be obvious that it’s not the flagrant gas-burning that people like for its own sake.

Honda makes a powerful if unglamorous SUV (the Pilot) that’s strong enough to tow 4500 pounds and roomy enough to carry 87 cubic feet of cargo. Which necessitates it getting 18 miles a gallon. The CAFE standard for “light trucks” is 20.7 mpg, which means Honda has to sell enough 36-mile-a-gallon Civics to raise its corporate mpg average, regardless of what the car-buying public wants (or would want, without government functionaries forcing Honda to meet 3rd-party standards, rather than maximize profit.)

Average fuel economy standards are a joke, created by politicians of both parties to feel good about themselves. If Congress wanted to truly “reduce our dependence on foreign oil*”, they’d order us to drive motorcycles.

The sad part is that more than a few dumb voters nod their heads and reelect these idiots, confident that legislating science is a) possible and b) worthwhile.

When you’re looking at buying a car, obviously you should think about how much you’ll spend on gas. But don’t make it your only criterion. By the way, our book Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense devotes an entire chapter to it. Which you can download free.

*Apparently, it’s perfectly fine to depend on foreign food, manufactured goods, software, banking, and cobalt, though. Only oil is sacred.

**This article is featured in the Carnival of Personal Finance #316-Family Edition**