Bastiat Meeting - December 2nd

Please join us in welcoming Dr. Robert Bradley Jr. from the
Institute for Energy Research.

Time:
5:00pm Reception
6:00pm Speaker

Place:
Harbor Club
35 Prioleau Street
Charleston, SC


His topic for us will be:

"Political Capitalism: The Beast that Broke the Cage"

Description:

Drawing upon his research for his book trilogy on political capitalism, Bradley explores the theory and history of business/government relations in the United States. Of particular interest in the author's take on Enron, where he worked for 16 years and was Ken Lay's speechwriter. While the mainstream interpreted the fallen giant as capitalism gone awry, Bradley convincingly shows that Enron was a government-dependent enterprise that would not have existed in a free-market economy.

Bradley is author of, most recently, Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy (the first volume of his trilogy), copies of which will be available at the talk.

Please RSVP by emailing us at - bastiatsociety@gmail.com

More on Dr. Robert Bradley Jr.

Robert L. Bradley Jr. is the founder and chief executive officer of the Institute for Energy Research, a 501(c) 3 educational foundation with offices in Houston, Texas, and Washington, D.C. He is an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute and of the Competitive Enterprise Institute; a visiting fellow of the Institute of Economic Affairs in London; and an honorary senior research fellow at the Center for Energy Economics at the University of Texas at Austin. Bradley, who holds a BA and MA in economics and a PhD in political economy, received the Julian L. Simon Memorial Award in 2002 for his work on free market approaches to energy sustainability.

Bradley worked at Enron for 16 years. As director of public policy analysis, he was a trenchant critic of the company's (government-dependent) investments in wind and solar and climate alarmism. His principled opposition to Ken Lay's "political capitalism" model is documented at http://www.politicalcapitalism.org/enron/.

Bradley is author, most recently, of Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy, an application of the capitalist worldview to corporate and energy controversies. His website www.politicalcapitalism.org expands on material in this work and in the two forthcoming books in his trilogy on corporate governance and political capitalism in the energy industry.

Bradley's other books are: The Mirage of Oil Protection (1989); Oil, Gas, and Government: The U.S. Experience (2 volumes: 1996), called "a landmark in regulatory studies"; Julian Simon and the Triumph of Energy Sustainability (ALEC: 2000); Climate Alarmism Reconsidered (2003); and (with Richard Fulmer) Energy: The Master Resource (2004), which Milton Friedman praised as a "splendid" book that "effectively debunks the widespread predictions of energy doom."

Bradley, who blogs at www.masterresource.org, has also published numerous essays pertaining to government intervention, with particular application to energy markets. His public-policy approach combines an understanding of the historical record with market-process economics and libertarian social theory.


For more information regarding the Institute for Energy Research click here.