“… consider why the United States has decided to encourage people to buy electric vehicles: It’s a new technology….”
– Samantha Page, “A Koch front group is putting out misleading attack ads on electric vehicles,” ThinkProgress, July 28, 2017.
“No electric car since 1902, regardless of battery or drive train, had been able to compete effectively against its contemporary internal combustion counterpart.”
– David Kirsch, The Electric Vehicle and The Burden of History (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 203.
“When government tries to pick losers and winners, it typically picks losers. Why? Because in a free market, consumers pick winners to leave the losers for government.”
– R. Bradley, Electric Car Verdict: Another Government-Subsidized Bust, September 26, 2012.
The energy past is important–and far too few journalists and advocates in the energy-policy area know their history.…
“Mr. Sherman knew that Alger was interested in the Diamond Match company to a large degree, and the purpose of the original anti-trust bill introduced by the Ohio financier, as I am positively informed by a senator who was then close to Mr. Sherman, was to punish Alger for his action in the national convention a few months before.”
Antitrust law has been more active in the petroleum industry than for any other area of the US economy, both before and after the passage of the federal Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. Chapter 26 of my Oil, Gas, and Government: The US Experience (Cato Institute: 1996) described the legislative history of state and federal antitrust law in the U.S., before examining case law in oil and gas.
In my research, the libertarian economist and historian Murray Rothbard alerted me to a peculiarity in the origin of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.…
“‘There are a lot of special interests in [Sacramento], and a lot of them came to play,’ said Brent Newell, general counsel with the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment, which pushed for policies to help people who live near sources of pollution, like refineries. ‘Utilities, agriculture, oil and gas, they all influenced significantly the contours of this [cap-and-trade] bill.'”-
– Brent Newell, Center for Race, Poverty, and the Environment. Quoted in Anne C. Mulkern, “Businesses Spent Millions Lobbying Before Cap-and-Trade Vote,” Climatewire,
“Cap-and-trade is what governments and the people in alligator shoes (the lobbyists for special interests) are trying to foist on you.”
– James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren (2009), p. 211.
An argument for the free market is that imperfect markets can be and often are better than government attempts to make things better. …