“I was asked once by some skeptics what the most important libertarian accomplishment ever was. I said ‘the abolition of slavery.’ OK, they conceded. Name another. I thought more carefully and said ‘bringing power under the rule of law’.”
– David Boaz, “Power and Law,” Cato Policy Report, July/August 2012, p. 2.
[Friday posts sometimes take a more general, big-picture look at the science of liberty and ‘why we fight.’ Cato executive vice president David Boaz is featured today in his recent editorial for Cato Policy Report. The Cato Institute has played an important role in energy and energy/environmental scholarship in the last several decades.]
At Public Policy Day, our event for Cato Sponsors held after the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty Dinner, I thanked our Sponsors for our beautiful expanded building.…
This summer Australia implemented a new tax on the country’s top 500 carbon emitters, which has already led to significant increase in electricity prices. Meanwhile, on August 2, Congressman Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) introduced his own carbon tax bill in the House of Representatives, which like the Australian tax is targeted at certain disfavored emitters.
Talk of a federal carbon tax has been recently revived by several conservative-leaning groups. Earlier this year Robert Inglis (former Republican Congressman from South Carolina) launched the Energy and Enterprise Institute, a new advocacy group aimed at marketing carbon taxes to Republicans. And last month rumors of carbon tax discussions at the American Enterprise Institute led AEI’s own Ken Green to reiterate his opposition to the carbon tax idea.
What sets the new conservative proponents of carbon taxes apart from traditional advocates is revenue neutrality.…
The coalition in support of wind power’s Production Tax Credit (PTC) has always had a bit of a Bootleggers and Baptists flavor: environmentalists making a clean and green argument in favor of wind power and the multinational wind power development corporations funding the political muscle needed to get things done.
The coalition has proven durable even as wind power took a few environmental hits, but now the business side of the coalition is beginning to fray. The PTC will expire at the end of 2012 unless Congress acts to extend it, and some interesting positions are being advertised as the tax-cliff approaches.
For example, the Chicago Tribune reports that Exelon Corp., a large electric power company that owns a significant amount of wind power and is a member of the American Wind Energy Association, is opposing efforts to renew the tax credit (sub.…