In an opinion piece published in yesterday’s Washington Post, environmental lawyer Dusty Horwitt proposed the idea of a “progressive” tax by which energy prices would be “kept at a consistently high level” in order to “make the technologies that overproduce information more expensive and less widespread.”

Why is an environmental lawyer making a tangential case for new energy taxes by targeting information technologies? Because, as Horwitt opines, an information overload created by blogs and other online media is strangling American democracy.

Maybe it’s just me, but reversing a trend by which millions of Americans are now able to make educated decisions about what they buy, how they behave, and what they believe doesn’t sound like democracy. In fact, it sounds like just the opposite.

There’s a reason that Johannes Gutenberg, who invented the world’s first printing press in 1450, was ranked first on Time Magazine’s list of the Most Important People of the Millennium. It’s because there is nothing more important to personal freedom, liberty, and the expansion of democratic values than access to information.

In this author’s humble opinion, blogs and other online media are the printing presses of the 21st Century. And rather than limit the use of, and access to, vital information technologies – either by regulation or economic means – we should be working to identify ways to bring more Americans into the fold.

The Internet isn’t just a source of information; it is hyper-democratic in and of itself. It’s a virtual world where each of us has an equal voice and an equal say – where citizen journalists, rather than those who control the editorial desk, are increasingly enabling people the world over to make their own decisions about what is worthy of our attention and what is not.

As such, the best course of action for those that are concerned about the growing power of blogs and overabundance of information they provide is to engage the online community with their own messages; not to tax the newly-inspired free speech of the Internet.

Thomas Jefferson once said that “Information is the currency of democracy.” Dusty Horwitt – whose own environmental movement has been one of the biggest beneficaries of the proliferation of Information Age technologies – would be wise to reflect upon those words.