Gas prices cannot rise to the point where it consumes all financial resources. Should gas prices rise to the point where nobody can afford to buy it, then obviously nobody will buy it. Demand plummets, supply rockets, and prices come back down. The system rebalances itself, reaches its proper equilibrium
Yeah, except you're presuming that an entire infrastructure of fuel-guzzling products is not built up in the period before the skyrocketing gas price.
If so, what happens to the economy when the price gets to high? Then you have lower demand because...the economy is wrecked, so no one can buy anything. Then there's also the fact that the people who sell the oil might receive enough benefit from less oil sold at a higher price to make it worth their while....again, no magic rule of the market prevents this, which is why you plan for it.
These are things you try to
avoid because they are catastrophic, not beautiful functions of the free market.
As for alternatives, why not take up the deal I proposed below? You allow me to develop whatever new sources I want (ANWR, coastal drilling, etc), and I let you develop whatever nerw sources you want (wind, solar, you name it). There would be only two requirements.
For one thing, those resources don't belong to you or to the oil companies-they belong to the US, and the US (at least in theory) belongs to the voters.
But anyway, it's irrelevant-it's silly to try and shut down every effort to conserve fuel and develop alternatives on the notion that oil will always be available (it won't-that is a fact) and that the purveyors of oil will always be forced to react to the market before their pricing
destroys the economy (no magic law of economics involved there either.)
Your viewpoint is not predictated on economics, it's predicated on fantasy economics where sellers must obey some magic law of pricing, and where sellers have complete control over the supply of a product that comes from the ground, mostly in places outside the USA, and that is finite in quantity.