Actually, the evidence is, I believe, pretty strong (though I haven't personally reviewed it), that higher cigarette taxes are more behind the decline in smoking than all the anti-smoking education efforts.
Economic incentives DO work. But they have to be on a scale commensurate with the opposing incentives.
If using gasoline confers major convenience advantages in obtaining employment, food, medical care, and transporting kids to playdates -- guess what. People will not curtail their gasoline use until gasoline prices are quite high. But there comes a point (varying by individual), when they will, in fact, do so.
The problem is that it affects people very differently.
Still, I believe Civicsman's comment is about something much more specific. Right now, as things stand, every time you fire up your beat up old gas guzzler, you are paying for the gasoline, but you are imposing a number of costs on everyone else:
- Air pollution
- CO2 injection into the atmosphere
- Traffic congestion
- Petroleum depletion
- Risk of injury and death
- Environmental costs associated with production and final disposition of the car and all of its parts (including tires over its lifetime).
Now, that sort of thing is true of most anything we do, and it's hard to quantify. Lots of problems with monetizing it. But it's hardly communism to want people to pay their full share of the costs they impose on others, nor is it communism to try to remove artificial economic incentives to make anti-social decisions.