A warning from the Investor’s Business Daily that should be taken to heart by everyone who is thinking of voting for any Democratic candidate:

With the advent of $4 gasoline, Democrats began sensing an opportunity to drive the country closer to their vision of utopia.

These are the people — or in some cases representatives of people — who want $8 a gallon gasoline so we’ll get out of our cars, turn off our air conditioners, dim our lights, strangle our commerce and impose a global asceticism in a post-capitalism wilderness.

Of course, this spartan existence would be for the masses only. The elites will still be able to live their lives of opulence, just as high-ranking communists in the Soviet Union, the nomenklatura, had private Chaika lanes in Moscow streets that members of the working class — Marx’s proletariat — were forbidden to drive on.

Al Gore provided a clear example Thursday of how such privileges are granted to the privileged by the privileged.

Gore, who wants to push Americans onto bikes and buses, used a convoy of two Lincoln Town Cars and one SUV to arrive for and then leave from his carbon-free speech at Constitution Hall in Washington.

As an American, Gore has the right to be a hypocrite. Neither he nor our elected officials, though, have the right to compel a free people to live the lives the Amerikan nomenklatura has selected for them. Washington’s role is to serve the people, not the other way around.