Michael Kinsley helps explain in his latest TIME column why he?s utterly incapable of offering good policy prescriptions involving taxes: He doesn?t know what a tax is.

Just five months ago, we were essentially paying a tax of $95 per bbl. That’s the difference between what oil cost then and what it costs now. This was a “tax” whereby the revenue went into the pockets of oil producers ? about two-thirds of them foreign countries and one-third fellow Americans.

Uh, no. That was a price increase based on changes in the market forces of supply and demand. In contrast, a tax is the government?s use of its powers of coercion (?you do what we tell you to do, or we throw you in jail?) to insert itself in a market transaction. Because the tax makes the prospective buyer less likely to want an item, while making the seller no more likely to want to supply the item (he gets no benefit from the higher price), neither party in the transaction benefits from the tax.

Kinsley wants to see us move away from a dependence on oil. OK, that can happen in two ways. First, the price of oil gets so high that alternatives are now priced more competitively than they were when oil was cheaper. Second, innovative entrepreneurs find ways to make oil alternatives less expensive, so they can compete with oil at its current price.

Kinsley likes option No. 1, and he wants government to use its taxing power to force that option. This idea leads invariably to higher energy prices.

The consumer ? in other words, all of us who use energy (or more simply, every person) ? prefers option No. 2. Why? Because this option ensures that we pay no more than we have to for the energy we need.

Will solar, wind, geothermal, etc., ever compete with oil at current prices? Who knows? But one thing is certain: Advocates of these alternative energies will lose all incentive to make those alternatives cheaper and more efficient if the government steps in to prop them up.