“We find that the arguments marshaled to support the hypothesis that a transition to a soft energy economy is inevitable are riddled with economic errors and are thus less than compelling. Moreover, we can’t help but note that past predictions by soft energy advocates about the future of the energy economy have proven wildly incorrect.”
– Jerry Taylor and Peter VanDoren (1999)
Twenty-one years ago, Jerry Taylor and Peter VanDoren of the Cato Institute published a journal article, “The Soft Case for Soft Energy,” in a special issue of the Journal of International Affairs, Fueling the 21st Century: The New Political Economy of Energy (Fall 1999). This article remains sound and prescient, with political energies continuing to be government-dependent versus their superior rivals.
This 11,000-word, 101-footnote essay is the longest and most comprehensive of Jerry Taylor’s career–and the most notable journal article he has published.…
Continue Reading“The energy stuff [in the 2009 bill] … was ginormous…. Ten years earlier, [President] Clinton pushed a five-year, $6 billion clean energy bill that went nowhere; at the time it was seen as preposterous and unrealistic, and it was. And here, 10 years later, $90 billion in the guy’s first month in office. Plus it leveraged another $100 billion in private money.”
– Michel Grunwald [Author, The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era (2012)], quoted here.
A matter of contention in this year’s Pandemic-related stimulus bills has been extraneous ‘Christmas Tree’ items such as targeted subsidies to wind, solar, batteries, electric vehicles, energy efficiency, “grid modernization,” and carbon capture and sequestration. (Note that such subsidies would be in addition to what is already received as other businesses.)…
Continue ReadingEd. note: Today is the birth date of Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), the greatest economist of his generation and, indeed, the 20th century. His many books and articles are eclipsed by his magnum opus (below), a book that profoundly influenced the current generation of free-market economists and classical liberals.
Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action: A Treatise on Economics stands as the single greatest social science book of the 20th century. Written in 1940, with an English edition in 1949 (with slight revisions in 1961 and 1966), Human Action has been described as economics as it might have been and should be.
No economists jokes here! This book is all about using sound assumptions and logically deriving the qualitative truths, the science, of economics.
I spent the summer of my sophomore year in college (1975) teaching tennis and studying Human Action.…
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