“When a liberal says it’s time for you to shut up, it usually means they’re losing an argument. When they want you arrested and prosecuted, well….”
– Steven Hayward, “Climatistas Double Down on Stupid,” Power Line, March 29, 2014.
When faced with a powerful, threatening argument to a troubled paradigm, those in denial will first ignore. If this does not work, they will ridicule. And it this does not work, they will shout and even use hateful talk.
“You just don’t get it,” Jeff Skilling would tell Enron’s detractors. Ken Lay, in the middle of his company’s implosion, likened short sellers and media critics to ‘terrorists’ (his last speech to employees was a few months after 9/11). The Enron duo wanted an undeserved peace. They were really saying: “Stop the criticism.…
“Political stabilization … allowed men to relax, to hope that crises might be avoided, to enjoy the bountiful fortunes they had already made.”
– Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism (New York: The Free Press, 1963), p. 285.
“Ironically, contrary to the consensus of historians, it was not the existence of monopoly that caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it.”
– Gabriel Kolko, ibid., p. 5.
Gabriel Kolko, a New Left historian who popularized the term political capitalism, and documented the role of business in initiating and furthering government intervention in the free-market economy, died this week at age 81.
I have mixed feelings about Kolko (1932–2014) as a scholar. (I never personally met him.) I grew up taking his work at face value, following my intellectual mentor Murray Rothbard.…
“The distinction between renewable and non-renewable resources is tenuous and perhaps in the last analysis untenable.”
– M. A. Adelman, The Economics of Petroleum Supply (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), p. 66.
M. A. Adelman, profiled yesterday, was an empirically driven energy economist. He was not a Malthusian because the data suggested otherwise. He found with petroleum what Julian Simon found in the the family of mineral resources.
Adelman’s writings richly describe the way to understand the paradox of expanding depletable resources. He emphasized that oil was a fungible, global commodity, and improving knowledge can overcome diminishing returns in different regions and certainly globally.
And Adelman captured a point that Alex Epstein today stresses: that oil is not a ‘natural resource’ but a man-made one, from finding the treasure in the ground to refining the raw material into useful human products to transporting the inputs to delivering the outputs to points of human consumption.…