Open international borders create mutually beneficial trading relationships that promote peace and prosperity. Tariffs, quotas, and other forms of protectionism and nationalism create conflict and lower living standards for all.

In our imperfect world of state-owned energy companies, some being U.S. foes, the imperative is policy reform toward private property rights, market exchange, and the rule of law. This is the real sustainability issue, not the exaggerated issue of anthropogenic climate change from carbon-based energy usage.

Private ownership of the subsoil, and privately owned energy infrastructure otherwise, would create wealth compared to the current system of political elitism. Private, dispersed wealth, such as initially assigning mineral rights to surface owners, such as proposed by Guillermo Yeatts, whose views are summarized in my post, “‘Theft of the Subsoil’: Guillermo Yeatts on Latin/South America mineral-rights reform,” would increase personal power and civil society, while reducing state power.…

“Conservative Me Too-ism is well represented in Responsibility & Resilience, at times almost to the point of tedium. The two American politicians with entries in the volume – former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg – are not exactly known as movement conservatives. And their entries do not disappoint.”

For many people, “conservative environmentalism” sounds oxymoronic. Since the rise of environmentalism in the 1960s, the Left has mostly managed to claim the moral high ground. They get to be for clean air, clean water, and saving the whales; for harmony with nature; and against pollution, deforestation, species extinction, and other bad things.

In response, conservatives have often let themselves be cast as the heavy in the Left’s morality tale, stuck talking about cost-benefit analyses and questioning whether low level exposure to some unpronounceable chemical compound is really so bad.…

July 31st is the birth date of one of the great intellectuals of the freedom philosophy. Milton Friedman (1912–2006) would have been 101 today.

Friedman Legacy Day is being celebrated at 144 events: 90 in 44 states and Washington,D.C., and 54 events in 25 countries abroad. Here in Houston, a “Milton Friedman Rocks” party is tonight.

Friedman was more than a technical economist and early Nobel Laureate in this field; he was a popularizer of the case for free markets. His shorter tracts and biweekly column for Newsweek covered a variety of in-the-news issues, including energy. And he became more libertarian and appreciative of Austrian School economics (market-process economics), the rival to his Chicago School of economics, as time went on.

Friedman’s insight into the distortions from government intervention shortages are timeless.…

“Government energy programs have been arrogant and, in many respects, irrational as well. Policymakers have often assumed that technological breakthroughs would occur simply because a law said they would happen. Of course, in reality, presidents, members of Congress, bureaucrats in the Department of Energy, or the EPA could not and cannot legislate, mandate, or decree technological advance.”

The U.S. will never have useful energy policies unless and until it abandons a 40-year-old half-truth: We consume more energy (particularly oil) than we produce and thus are “dangerously” dependent on world markets.

The story—what I call the U.S. energy narrative—was created in the 1970s, and was widely accepted because it superficially explained the energy crises.

In the story, the U.S. was the victim of big oil companies who wanted our money and Arab oil sheikhs who not only wanted our money but also sought to use oil as a weapon to affect a change in our international policies.…