There are about two hundred million involuntary oil traders in the US right now: everyone who owns a car has a long-term liability, denominated in oil. For no particular reason, the two hundred million car owners, with no interest whatsoever in oil prices, hold on to the liability.

There is a better way. Every time someone takes on a long-term liability — a heating bill, a tank to fill, an addictive habit like caffeine or alcohol — they should make an accompanying bet hedging their new exposure to the underlying commodity.

It sounds like this is introducing speculation into a normal transaction, but the opposite is true: gas price fluctuations make it into headlines, even though people change their behavior very little based on gas price fluctuations (one economist found that heroin addicts are more price-sensitive). So if someone buys a car, it’s likely that they’re buying a fairly constant amount of gas consumption over the next few years. Once they’ve made that decision, they shouldn’t have to think about gas prices for a few years — but they think about those prices anyway.

A better system would be to sell someone a fixed amount of gas at a fixed price with every new car. You could base it on futures, so the gas-package could be zeroed out instantly. And instead of making decisions based on the spot price plus hazy predictions, oil companies could get an accurate picture of their future demand — because that demand was fixed by one-time deals.

Within a few years, this idea would take off, and worrying about gas prices ruining your road trip would be as quaint as worrying that if the weather didn’t improve, a bad harvest would make you would starve to death. The idea could be extended to other consumer products — clothes, groceries — and financial decisions like careers (before going to law school, you could insure yourself against a sudden decline in the salary of new associates).

The simplest summary of the whole scheme is this: use small-scale derivatives and semi-automated markets to slice up consumer purchases so people pay for what they want and can mostly ignore the rest.

And someone is making it happen.

Granted, they’re doing it as a joke, but it’s a start: Beetswap theoretically lets people who buy beets trade the less desirable beets (or greens) for the more desirable greens (or beets). The transaction costs are high, but it’s the same idea: there is no particular reason that people who want greens should be stuck with beets; there is no particular reason that people who want to be able to drive places should be stuck with a short position in oil. It would take some effort, but creating a market for consumer derivatives would fix this problem.

It could happen. And if it happens to start with beets, so be it.