I remember paying about $1.25 USD per gallon when I first started driving. I remember my parents and grandparents talking about how expensive it had gotten. I asked very naively "how much was it before it 'got expensive'?" and I think they said it had been about 75 cents for a long time. I might be misremembering that, but whatever the response was, it seemed far cheaper. Evidence that capitalism is doomed to failure is that it took less than 3 decades for the lifeblood of society to increase in price basically 500%.