Forget about how much you like either oil companies or taxes.  Let’s boil down the comparison to either taxing profits or taxing gasoline prices.

Taxing profits will reduce the incentive to increase future supply, even if you think oil companies form a cartel.  Fewer profits means less exploration and less incentive to develop new extraction technologies.

The weakening of supply responses is desirable only if you think we are approaching the "end of oil" — and indeed all feasible substitutes — and that we don’t want to discover more oil right now.  Perhaps it would be better to run out our string of doom more slowly.  You also presumably would believe that more conservation, as would be induced by higher prices, won’t much help.  These views, taken together, are possible but I find them doubtful.

Alternatively, you might believe that our government can tax short-run profits that arise from supply kinks or slow-to-adjust refineries.  Yet we will magically remove those taxes within a few months, so they do not discourage long-run elasticity of supply.  That again strains the imagination.

Taxing gas prices puts an immediate burden on motorists, although the profits tax may bring higher prices in the longer run.  But the gas tax encourages conservation and maintains the incentive for new supply.  Surely that is the superior approach. 

Addendum: Jane Galt and her readers have relevant thoughts.

Sure, as John Kenneth Galbraith argued, advertising can encourage people to buy things that may not make them happy.  The solution to the advertising problem, however, is not less advertising but more.  A society with a lot of advertising is a society in which advertising is not very powerful. In any case, the competitive cacophony of the market place where the very
desperateness of the advertisers is itself an advert for their
impotence is no real danger. 

The real danger is not from Madison Avenue.  At the very worst, when Madison Avenue tells us how white our shirts can be, we end up with lighter pockets but whiter shirts.  It’s political advertising, which often creates social images that fuel the politics of hatred, where the real danger lies.  Even in the best of democracies, political advertising is nowhere near as competitive as in the market for deodorant and the product being sold is much more dangerous.    

Around the world, reserves of US dollars and Treasury securities have more than doubled over the past 5 years.  It’s nice for us when we get to buy goods and pay in paper but what will happen when we face reserve reverse?  And why, asks Eduardo Porter, do poor countries continue to fund our consumption?

The amount that poor countries are giving up by holding low yield Treasuries is not inconsiderable.  Larry Summers calculates that India has reserves in excess of those required for prudent insurance in the realm of 100 billion dollars – if invested in higher paying assets those reserves could raise Indian GDP by 1-1.5%, more than double the amount that India spends on health care.

So claims a NYT obituary for John Kenneth Galbraith.  CrookedTimber and Brad DeLong question whether such models should be called "proofs."  Fair enough, but neither does the obituary correctly represent Becker’s theory of advertising.  As I understand Becker’s work (with Kevin Murphy) on the topic, individuals consume "social images" or "self-images."  Having Nike shoes gives you the "benefits of being cool" if a) you actually have Nikes, and b) the ad links Nikes to a cool image for your relevant peer group.  The standard economic theory of complements then applies for analyzing ads.  Under some conditions, advertising can be a "bad" for consumers, not a "good," and advertisers will pay consumers to watch ads.  Furthermore ads will present images and cultural linkages, rather than substantive information in the traditional sense.  This generates some Galbraithian results, but without requiring that consumers are "tricked" or even "persuaded" into a particular point of view.   This is not a proof; I think of it as an existence theorem that advertising can make corporate sense, and sometimes be socially welfare-improving, yet without being very informative.

Keep in mind that Becker titled his 1998 book Accounting for Tastes, a concession to the Galbraithian way of thinking.

These studies usually give economics a bad name:

We should be skeptical of “economic impact” studies that show the importance of the arts to a community. A study of this kind might show that an arts festival or new arts arena brings millions of dollars in economic value. But these studies typically treat arts expenditures as creating value out of nothing. Implicitly it is assumed that if the money had not been spent on the arts, no other economic or social values would have been produced. Again, the relevant comparison is whether an arts arena leads to more value than some alternative. When we look at economic impact studies for one industry at a time, they all appear to show high benefits. But this means that the net benefits of any single project are low, zero, or perhaps even negative on average. By investing in one good idea we are always forsaking another good idea. In essence those studies list gross benefits rather than net benefits. Furthermore, once an economic impact study is being done, the resources are likely no longer undervalued.

That is from my Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding.

Remember when Google (partially) bypassed the investment banks and held its own auction of its shares?  Many people thought this was the trend of the future.  Why let investment banks underprice the issue and take such a big cut?  Well it turns out that when IPO auctions are available they usually end up abandoned:

We document a somewhat surprising regularity: of the many countries
that have used IPO auctions, virtually all have abandoned them. The
common explanations given for the lack of popularity of the auction
method in the U.S., viz., issuer reluctance to try a new experimental
method, and underwriter pressure towards methods that lead to higher
fees, do not fit the evidence. We examine why auctions have failed and
verify, to the extent possible, that they are consistent with what
academic theory predicts. Both uniform price and discriminatory
auctions are plagued by unexpectedly large fluctuations in the number
of participants. The free rider problem and the winner’s curse hamper
price discovery and discourage investors from participating in
auctions. That may explain the inaccurate pricing and poor aftermarket
performance of IPOs using auctions.

Here is the link and paper, by Ravi Jagannathan and Ann Sherman.  Here are free copies of the paper.  The explanation is not complete, because the auctions often provide a superior price.  Nonetheless the risk is greater plus buyers are more likely to abandon the market in subsequent periods.  This article is long and not always fun to read, but it definitely falls into the "I learned something today" category.