Gas Prices "Too High"?

The Ayn Rand Institute's Alex Epstein recently wrote a good op-ed piece titled "What to Do About Rising Gas Prices". Here is an excerpt:

There is no moral or economic justification for any politician or consumer to declare market prices "too high," and to use the government to coerce lower prices. To do so violates both the rights of gasoline producers and their productive customers to set voluntary prices -- and, in doing so, causes destructive shortages. When shortages exist, how much gasoline one is able to get depends not on one's willingness to pay a mutually agreeable price, but on one's political pull to secure rations, or on whether one has time on one's hands to wait in endless lines (as in the 1970s).

There is only one sense in which we are entitled to tell the government to "do something" about gasoline prices: insofar as these prices are made artificially high by the government's many regulations on oil and gasoline production.

He then goes on to cite a few such regulations that cause the price of gasoline to be as high as it is, and the concludes: "What should the government do about gasoline prices? Get its hands out of the market--and keep them off."