“A carbon tax is hardly a genuine market solution analogous to other introductions of property rights.”
“Libertarians and conservatives in particular should not simply trust the assurances from the advocates of a carbon tax but should instead read the relevant literature themselves. In both theory and practice, a U.S. carbon tax remains a very dubious policy proposal.” (p. 21)
A new study by the Cato Institute usefully brings together arguments from physical science and social science to demonstrate that giving government a new area of taxation is fraught with difficulty. In one sense it is a cure worse than the disease; in another sense it is an open sesame for growing government–and a punitive weapon against a ‘politically incorrect’ industry, coal first, oil second, natural gas third.
Robert P. Murphy is a research assistant professor at Texas Tech University and senior economist at the Institute for Energy Research.…
“How could Clinton make money when people on average lose? There are two possibilities: She may have been incredibly lucky. Or it may have been fixed that she would gain and not lose. Neither possibility reflects well on her.”
“[T]he investment records of commodities between 1900 and 1975 … showed that the investor would have lost spectacularly by buying and holding commodities; AAA bonds produced a rate of return 733 per cent higher than holding resources.”
- Julian Simon: 1996 (below)
Remember the Clinton commodity-investment home run back in 1994? One thousand dollars increased one-hundred-fold in ten months of trading. Some of the facts were reported at the time by the Washington Post:
…Hillary Rodham Clinton was allowed to order 10 cattle futures contracts, normally a $12,000 investment, in her first commodity trade in 1978 although she had only $1,000 in her account at the time, according to trade records the White House released yesterday.
“In the late 1970s, only three prominent energy experts continued to insist that oil prices would not rise inexorably and to display a contrariness to all efforts to dissuade them: Peter Odell of Erasmus University, the late Morry Adelman of MIT, and Arlon Tussing.” (Michael Lynch, below)
Several months ago, a giant of modern energy economics died at age 82. I belatedly sing his praises.
Arlon Tussing, author, co-author, or editor of an estimated 300 books and publications, influenced a generation of market-oriented energy economists. He also educated the energy industry by being realistic and blunt at a time when the conventional thinking was that ‘depleting’ resources meant that costs and prices had to go up.
Tussing analysis such as in his 1983 “An OPEC Obituary” (Public Interest) were spot-on, at a time when many voices were saying ‘Just Wait’ for Energy Crisis #3 (following #1’s Arab OPEC in 1973/74 and #2’s Iranian Revolution in 1979).…