“But nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program,” Milton and Rose Friedman wrote in their 1983 primer, Tyranny of the Status Quo. And regarding government help for a developing business? “The infant industry argument is a smoke screen,” the husband-and-wife team observed. “The so-called infants never grow up.”

Industrial wind power is certainly not an infant industry, having been demonstrated as grid electricity in the nineteenth century and again during World War II. [1] But it is dilute and intermittent, fatal qualities as against fossil-fuel generated electricity.

And so although the wind interests have claimed competitiveness (actual or impending) since the 1980s, and received a lifeline subsidy in 1992 (below), the U.S. industrial wind industry is as dependent on government largesse as ever.…

“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”

– Milton Friedman

It was supposed to be a ten year window to allow commercial nuclear power to prove its economy and safety. But the Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act of 1957 (Price-Anderson Act), capping damage claims and establishing a fund “to protect the public and to encourage the development of the atomic energy industry,” is still with us today, some two-thirds of a century later.

The 1957 law’s limit of $60 million per plant (about 10x in today’s dollars) was supplemented by an up-to-$500 million indemnification guarantee per accident. [1] These provisions, vetted among the parties, was just enough to remove a major barrier to the commercialization of nuclear power for electric utilities and for Westinghouse, GE, and others to build.…

“The whole thing is a misdirect. Were any of you serious, it would have been a zoom meeting. All of the stopping climate change proposals are bullshit because they require rounds of GLOBAL CONSUMPTION. Forcing everyone to buy a new stove, water heater, HVAC system and car all at once is not decarbonization, it’s a disaster for the planet. This is all industry driven to force consumption.”

– Steven Lamb, Institute for Sound Public Policy (below)

They had it coming. James Hansen, no less, called the 2015 Paris Agreement “a fraud really, a fake.” And fossil fuels almost a decade later are that much more embedded.

But will the disillusioned true believers want to check their premises and change course?

“The only person who can truly persuade you is yourself,” Milton and Rose Friedman once wrote [Free to Choose (1979), p.…

“The case of Guillermo Yeatts for subsoil privatization should eclipse ‘climate change’ as the number one policy initiative of the 21st century. This friend of private property, free markets, the rule of law, and civil society, a successful entrepreneur in his own right, a thinker and doer, has set up an excellent opportunity for a new political era in his beloved Argentina.”

Give me liberty, not corruption and poverty! The recent election of Javier Milei of La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advances) in Argentina was a resounding vote for freedom and prosperity. And don’t let the mainstream media marginalize him (“frequent conservative provocateur” … “far-right libertarian rants” ….). He has a grand opportunity to enact a national “social justice” that could be a model for many other nations in Latin and South America and in other regions of the world.…