Absurd Energy Policy

"As the great 19th-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat pointed out, if jobs are your yardstick, you might as well go round breaking windows so as to create jobs for glaziers."

Nigel Lawson says the Coalition's absurd energy policy is damaging industry | Mail Online

Glowing Endorsement

"The Japanese government, in particular, has aggressively pushed nuclear in its quest for energy independence, perverting with political considerations the market’s natural ability to take safety issues into account."

Glowing endorsement - WWW.THEDAILY.COM

High Gas Prices

"When you drive gas prices higher to make a profit, you're bad; when you drive gas prices higher to save the environment, it's good."

Capitalism Magazine - Why Liberals and Environmentalists Want High Gas Prices

Carbon Conscious at Copenhagen?

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.

Cap and Tax

The economics of clean electricity is simple - if we demand clean energy, they will provide it - at a cost. If we, as a society have decided against "dirty" energy (as the politicians claim we have), then we should have no problem paying a premium for it. If our policy makers are confident that society is truly against "dirty" energy, why disguise the additional costs through subsidies, taxes, and carbon trading systems? Why not simply force energy companies to "go green" and make us pay for though increased energy bills? I suspect that would be to much to ask of our pseudo environmentalist policy makers.

Nov 12th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Nuclear energy is unlikely to work without a carbon tax

PLANNING is not the only obstacle to a rebirth of nuclear power in Britain. The technology’s torturous economics are, if anything, even trickier. The trouble is that, whereas the fuel is cheap, nuclear-power plants themselves are very expensive to build and the pay-off from that investment is slow. To the industry’s opponents, all this is proof that nuclear electricity is uneconomical. Generous atomic subsidies offered in America—including loan guarantees, tax breaks and promises to cover cost overruns—lend support to that view, though ministers have promised that new nuclear plants in Britain will receive no such special treatment.


Read the entire article here

A National Straitjacket

T.Boone Pickens was recently on CNBC calling for a national energy plan. Without such a plan, he says that in ten years the United States will be importing 75% of its energy, and that oil will be $300 a barrel.

Such precision in long range forecasting is admirable, but it is not credible.

We've heard this kind of thing before. Remember Uncle Joe's Five Year Plans? Or the Great Helmsman's Great Leap Forward? Now we have the paradox of an American businessman promoting the same kind of national-scale economic planning that worked so well in the USSR and Mao's Red China.

With friends like this, who needs enemies?

There is no reason to believe that T. Boone Pickens is any better at telling the future than the rest of us. Ten years ago, the number one planning issue was Y2K. It turned out to be a non-event.

In 1999, the most important things to come were apparently unimaginable, even to a visionary like Mr. Pickens: a major terrorist attack in New York, the near death of the American airline industry, a war in Afghanistan, another war in Iraq, record low interest rates, the drowning of New Orleans, a housing bubble, a stock market bubble, the worst recession since the Great Depression, a government takeover of GM, Wachovia at 76 cents per share, two bankrupt Wall Street firms, and a government rescue and significant ownership of Citigroup.

Alas, the world we live in is so messy and filled with so many surprises that it makes any national ten year plan a joke. Such a plan leaves no room for individual preferences or the discovery of new knowledge. Inevitably, such a plan turns into a national straitjacket.

If Mr. Pickens really wants to help the nation, he should promote the kind of planning that made him a success in business. That kind of planning is individual and opportunistic, not national and proscriptive. Long-term results emerge from individuals responding to rapidly changing opportunities, not from one individual commandeering an entire industry.

Mr. Pickens has demonstrated the ability to make opportunistic business decisions, and for that he should be admired. But success in business does not qualify him or anyone else to engineer a master plan for America's Great Leap Forward. Believing in such a plan is a mistake; following it would be an even bigger one.