CHEAP OIL is coming back. For weeks, gleeful cartoons have appeared on editorial pages featuring grubby, disheveled-looking oil sheiks swamped by a black tide labeled "Oil Glut." Headlines have celebrated an incipient price war among the OPEC states. Reduced demand, it seems, is finally forcing down the price of oil, breaking up the widely hated OPEC cartel in the process. "The free market came to the rescue," exulted William F. Buckley recently in the National Review.

With surprising unanimity, however, The New York Times, William Safire, The New Republic, and Buckley have all come out against passing on the price break to American consumers. Lower prices, they agree, will lead to higher consumption, so that OPEC would, in Safire's words, "be back in the saddle again." Instead, says the Times, we should "build on the exporters' current weakness" with an oil import tax. Safire and Buckley enthusiastically concur, arguing for a tax to "smash the price fixers and supply-controllers," and to "tear OPEC apart." An oil import tax, these foes of Big Oil contend, would keep domestic prices high, thus maintaining present trends towards conservation and increased domestic production. This would, in turn, enable the US to further its independence from foreign oil.

The argument has a nice "free market" ring to it, and, in view of the impressive conservation gains of the past decade, seems to have some merit. Efficiency of industrial energy use, measured by real Gross National Product produced per unit of energy consumed, has jumped nearly 40 percent since 1974. Home insulation, smaller cars, and other conservation measures have cut consumer energy use dramatically; overall, America's energy consumption has declined by 0.5 percent per year since 1973.

But these gains have cost us dearly in economic hardship. A market that takes ten years of slow economic collapse to reduce demand in response to a rise in prices cannot be called "free." It would be callous and foolish for us to ignore the gross imperfections in the oil market, and make the US government play OPEC just to make us less vulnerable to the real OPEC.

Such a move would mean needlessly perpetuating the cruel exigencies that conservation has forced on us. High prices for gas and heating fuel place an extraordinary burden on the poor, whose "conservation" efforts frequently mean choosing food over heat in the winter. The depressing economic influence of a $15-a-barrel tax on oil imports, according to Safire's own estimate, would cost us one million jobs. Liberal supporters of an oil import tax suggest that revenues from the tax be channelled to the poor, but, given the current political climate, it would be naive to expect such an allocation. The money would probably go to reduce the deficit, as Safire has suggested.

TRYING to achieve energy independence through artificially high oil prices would be foolish because it wouldn't work. The recent history of the auto industry exemplifies the clumsiness of high prices as a mechanism to promote conservation. Detroit continued to manufacture gas-guzzlers long after gas prices soared, as auto executives balked at the massive investment required to switch to making smaller cars. Higher gas prices made consumers prefer more efficient cars, but the cars weren't available until years after the consumers wanted them, and then only after the government required the car companies to improve the mileage of their fleets.

Now, as gas prices drop, demand for big cars is picking up. Simply taxing the more wasteful cars and continuing present regulation of the auto industry would more effictively promote efficiency than arbitrarily forcing all car owners--frugal or wasteful--to pay higher prices.

The "free market" has also proven inadequate to stimulate domestic energy production. Higher prices have admittedly moved the oil companies to step up their drilling, but exorbitant levels are needed to sustain even a modest amount of new exploration. The relatively small drop in imported oil prices since December, 1981 (slightly less than $6 per barrel) has caused the number of rigs in operation to drop by more than half. Once again, specific regulatory action--such as subsidies for oil exploration and development of alternate energy sources--would be more effective and less damaging than a hamhanded oil import tax.

Much of the support for the tax stems from a fear that OPEC will reunite, ratchet oil prices back up, an deliver yet another stunning oil shock to the economy. This fear is wholly unfounded. If OPEC were really in control of the oil market, it could just reduce production to keep prices up. OPEC cannot do this, because it now controls only 43 percent of the West's oil supply, as opposed to 60 percent in 1979. OPEC's coherence derived from Saudi Arabia's ability to unilaterally set the price of oil; in the past two years, the Saudi's share of the market has plummeted leaving OPEC an undisciplined band of squabbling, individually weak producers. Rather than cringing from OPEC's shadow, we should concentrate on rebuilding our own economy, preparing rationally for the day when all of the oil runs out.