Americans are ready for a surcharge on fuels to be used for making the economy more sustainable

How would the residents of the USA respond to a 25% increase at the cost of the increase the pump this election year?

In contrast to the USA, Oman is traditionally considered a largely collective society. This should mean that they make great decisions based more upon the common good than based upon personal needs and personal calls for rights.

"Collectivism is the idea that the individual's life belongs not to [so much to] him but to the group or society of which he is merely a part, that he has no [, few, or lesser] rights, and that he must sacrifice his values and goals for the group's 'greater good.' According to collectivism, the group or society is the basic unit of moral concern, and the individual is of value only insofar as he serves the group."

In Asian lands, collectivism is not necessarily inherently either more communist nor more capitalist in nature. For example, Asian countries, like Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand" tend to be capitalistic. Meanwhile, China and Vietnam have tended to be both capitalistic and communistic. Countries like North Korea and the former Soviet Union were/are much more communistic than any of the other current Asian nations mentioned. Nevertheless, all these countries are much more collectivist historically than many Western societies have been.

In the USA individualism has often been claimed to be the status quo.

"Individualism is the idea that the individual's life belongs to him and that he has an inalienable right to live it as he sees fit, to act on his own judgment, to keep and use the product of his effort, and to pursue the values of his choosing. It's the idea that the individual is sovereign, an end in himself, and the fundamental unit of moral concern. This is the ideal that the American Founders set forth and sought to establish when they drafted the Declaration and the Constitution and created a country in which the individual's rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness were to be recognized and protected."

Despite the American bent towards individualism historically, Americans have at-times turned to collectivist solutions. In terms of taxing themselves, Americans have been world leaders in terms of creating new forms of taxes. Cities, states and the federal government have certainly taxed individuals and individual corporations more than does currently the more collectivist county of Oman where I live. (Here there is no national or local tax on income for example.)

Further, I should note, both the American social security system and the nation's creation of a great variety of insurance companies (and the lawyers behind them) also reveal a collectivist bent for corralling in the excesses and neglect found in individualism. Moreover, the demand for strong police protection in the USA, including a more intrusive set of police-state apparatuses, i.e. in the form of Homeland Security, FBI, and states agencies, marks America or Americans as more collectivist than Oman and many other-supposedly-more-collectivist regimes in North America, in the Middle East, in Asia and around the world.

In answer to the question above, i.e. would Americans accept a 25% increase in fuel prices again in 2016 if it was good for the greater commonweal, I believe they would. However, the case must be made clear by the national government (or state governments) the rationale for such surcharges.

Any moneys taken in the form of a tax or surcharge on fuel must be used for the greater good of our future--reducing climate change, for example. The development of alternative energies, the building of alternative fuel energy sources, and spending on fuel conservation methods in the years ahead are already part of the American Dream for many. Meanwhile, many polls reflect my belief in this collectivist bent in finding solutions for national problems, in terms of raising fuel surcharges in order to transform the USA's dependence on petroleum fuels now and in the future--just as is the case in Oman. America, simply, lacks the leadership in Washington (and in many state capitals) to get this done in 2016.

SOURCES

Biddle, Craig, "Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice", https://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2012-spring/individualism-collectivism/

"No Cause for Alarm", http://www.theweek.co.om/disCon.aspx?Cval=8847

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