Category — Hayek, F. A.

“[A]s my father liked to tell me, ‘Son, a fool with a plan can beat a genius with no plan any day.’ Right now, when it comes to America and our effort to achieve greater energy security, we’re a foolish nation without a plan.

If it were up to me, America’s energy plan would have ….”

- T. Boone Pickens, “Leadership Absent on Energy Plan,” Omaha World-Herald, May 1, 2013.

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine the can design.”

- F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), p. 76.

T. Boone Pickens, the author and marketer of three national energy plans (see yesterday’s post), is a “man of system,” to use Adam Smith’s phrase from the mid-18th century.

Pickens’s grandiose scheme to use the powers of government to implement wind-for-natural-gas in  electrical generation and natural-gas-for-oil in transportation (Pickens I) inspired Carl Pope, then head of the Sierra Club, to state back in 2008: “To put it plainly, T. Boone Pickens is out to save America.” [1] Plans II and III dropped wind (when business Boone did) to just push natural gas in the transportation market.

To plan or not plan–that is the wrong question in the realm of human action. Purposeful human action is planning. A central plan enforced by government (which by definition has a legal monopoly on the initiation of force) precludes planning on the individual and group level done by voluntary means.

Thus T. Boone Pickens has fundamentally misconstrued the question of planning which is who will plan: the market through private property, voluntary exchange, and the rule of law or government through its “experts” and legal monopoly on coercion.

Early Warming: Adam Smith [Read more →]

“The Sustainable Development Challenge Grant program is also a step in implementing ‘Agenda 21, the Global Plan of Action on Sustainable Development,’ signed by the United States at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. All of these programs require broad community participation to identify and address environmental issues.”

- Environmental Protection Agency, 63 Fed. Reg. 45157 (August 24, 1998).

On January 26, 2012, I attended the final meeting in Batavia, NY, for the Finger Lakes “Regional ‘Sustainability’ Plan,” part of New York State Energy Research and Development Authority’s $10 million statewide program to have regional Planning Departments orchestrate “sustainability” plans described in NYSERDA’s “Cleaner, Greener Communities” Program. Here is my take on what is going on in regard to this extensive plan across New York State.

As those who have studied the United Nations’s ‘Agenda 21′ plan know, “Sustainability” is a key buzzword that is part-and-parcel of the UN’s ‘Agenda 21′. There is no doubt that the “Sustainability” Plan currently being devised by Planning Departments across the state, who are acting “under NYSERDA’s thumb” (as one Planner phrased it at their first meeting in Batavia), is ‘Agenda 21′ in the works (think carbon taxes, ‘green’ energy transfer-of-wealth schemes, and one-world governance).

At the “open-house style” meeting in Batavia last week, folks were asked to read the poster boards relevant to each part of the overall plan: Land Use, Water Use, Agriculture, Forestry, Waste Management, Economic Development, and Energy — and to then use sticky notes to post their comments on the boards for each particular segment of the plan. [Read more →]

“Running out of resources” has been a common refrain among the intellectual class and policymakers since the beginning of the oil industry. L. C. Gray (1913) and Harold Hotelling (1931) cemented the fixity-depletion view of minerals that swept the economics profession; so did the presidency of Jimmy Carter, in the (regulatory-induced) troubled 1970s.

Remember the lament of James Schlesinger, the  first energy secretary for Carter’s new Department of Energy: “We have a classic Malthusian case of exponential growth against a finite source.” And the confident conclusion of Amory Lovins:

All oil and gas resources should be carefully husbanded—i.e. extracted as late and as slowly as possible. Our descendents will be grateful. We, too, shall need a long bridge to the future.

But when surplus conditions with oil and gas returned in the 1980s, the lost voices of Erich Zimmermann and M. A. Adelman, and the new voice of Julian Simon, found an audience.

Planned Conservation (Conservationism)

The depletionist worldview raised the question of what was the ‘right’ consumption profile, which inevitably involved government intervention to correct the alleged ‘market failure’ of overproduction/overconsumption. Enter F. A. Hayek (1899–1992), one of the century’s leading critics of government planning.

In The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Hayek evaluated “the necessity of central direction of the conservation of natural resources,” a view that was “particularly strong in the United States, where the ‘conservation movement’ has to a great extent been the source of the agitation for economic planning and has contributed much to the indigenous ideology of the radical economic reformers.” [1] [Read more →]