“The majority of businessmen prefer power and government-guaranteed profits to philosophical consistency; they are more than willing to trade off market principles for a system that promises less competition and more security…. Almost every major piece of interventionist legislation since 1887 has had important business support, and certainly regulation in the oil and gas industry is no exception.”
“Economic planning by its very nature is people planning. It is part of a misguided policy that would return us to the dark ages of political economy where the State controlled the entire economy and society in its own political interests. To return to that system is to finally abandon the American experiment and the American dream.”
– – Charles G. Koch (1977)
[Part I: Yesterday]
I would now like to turn to the more subtle historical and political implications of Thornton Bradshaw’s call for planning in oil.…
Continue Reading[Editor Note: This letter by Koch Industries’s CEO Charles G. Koch, addressed to Fortune Editor-in-Chief Hedley Donovan, provides a pro-free market rebuttal to ARCO’s CEO Thornton Bradshaw’s “My Case for National Planning” (Fortune, February 1977).
Koch’s scholarly effort is reproduced below as a historically important document in the energy debate. It is authored by a rarity of rarities, a principled free-market capitalist. The context and timeliness of the rebuttal was stated in the Libertarian Review at the time:
… Continue ReadingWhile this essay was only the latest in a series of attacks on a free market economy and defenses of National Economic Planning to appear over the past few years by intellectuals, businessmen and labor leaders alike, Bradshaw’s piece deserves special scrutiny. For it comes to us from a man who both is a leading representative of American major oil companies, and was a member of Jimmy Carter’s task force on energy during the 1976 presidential campaign.
On September 21, 2010, U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) introduced a bill[1] that would create an insidious national “Renewable Electricity Standard” (RES). Bingaman now has 32 cosponsors but expects 60.
The bill would result in higher monthly bills for millions of home owners and renters, farms, businesses, industries, hospitals, educational institutions, and any other organization that uses electricity.
Despite the intense citizen displeasure with Congress, Bingaman’s RES bill shows that both Democrats and Republicans, while in Washington, are eager to favor special interests and their lobbyists while ignoring the adverse impact of their actions on the nation’s ordinary citizens, consumers and taxpayers. The bill belies Republican claims that they favor less federal government intrusion, control, and damage.
Key Provisions
The bill would require that, by 2021, 15% of the electricity sold by an electric utility must be generated from wind or certain other “renewable” energy sources, or from energy efficiency.…
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