“A new ethic is needed for corporate America, one where cronyism, obvious or subtle, is uncovered, reported, and criticized by the media and the public. Corporations will do the right thing under the new norms of a free, civil society.”
Corporations can practice Principled Entrepreneurship™ wherein “good profits” are derived from private property rights and voluntary exchange. Common ethical standards are respected in this quest as well.
Or corporations can practice contra-capitalism, mixing rent-seeking (cronyism) with philosophic fraud and imprudence.
A major corporation, ExxonMobil, and a major trade association, the Edison Electric Institute, used their financial and membership powers at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to go contra-capitalist on the issue of a resolution challenging the science behind Obama’s 2009 Clean Power Plan.
As described by Sterling Burnett at Climate News:
A resolution calling on the U.S.…
[Editor note: Earlier this week, Alex Epstein and Tyler White gave three minute talks to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in San Francisco on the Obama-era Clean Power Plan. Epstein’s comments are videotaped here. The two’s comments are transcribed below (h/t to Don Watkins).]
…“But most of what I’m hearing today, most what I’m seeing outside, certainly most of what I’m seeing from our public officials–particularly our most famous representative, Nancy Pelosi–is complete carelessness and complete obliviousness to the consequences of radically restricting fossil fuels, as well as completely bizarre and self-contradictory exaggerations about the negatives.” – Alex Epstein to EPA (below)
“Many people today have said that it’s not government policies that are killing coal, but that coal is getting outcompeted. Fine. Let us compete–let us compete on an even playing field with every other energy producer.
“R Street continues to live the lie of ‘engag[ing] in policy research and outreach to promote free markets and limited, effective government.’ Pricing carbon dioxide, replete with global tariffs (‘border adjustments’) and tax differentials (‘equity adjustments’), coupled with a government-forced transformation to (not so) ‘clean’ political energies, has nothing to do with classical liberalism, energy freedom, free markets, or limited-and-effective government.”
It had to happen.
With its Left Progressive donors, R Street Institute was going to march down the statist road as one initiative got replaced with another.
Founded in 2012 with climate-alarmist/Left money, R Street tried to shed into new free-market skin by pitching a seemingly soft proposal to substitute new/better government intervention for worse/existing intervention. Specifically, replace existing climate regulation with carbon-dioxide (CO2) tax-and-dividend. That was during the Obama era, assumed to turn into the Hillary era.…