“Add [to rent-seeking] the company’s rank imprudence and strategic deceit (what I labeled philosophic fraud), and a new term had to be invented to describe that which true capitalist luminaries from Adam Smith forward warned against: the contra-capitalist corporation.”

For many years now, as a poor man’s Robert Caro, I have labored to demonstrate that the worldview-testing event called Enron was Exhibit A of crony capitalism and Progressivism, not free-market capitalism and the classical liberalism.

The Progressive mainstream argued emphatically for their conclusion. Two examples are among my favorites. Paul Krugman in the New York Times: “I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.” Robert Kuttner in BusinessWeek: “Defenders of deregulation are mounting a heroic effort to insist that the [Enron] debacle was merely a business model gone bad, not an impeachment of freer markets”.…

“Do you operate the ‘Institute of Energy Research’ out of your living room? What exactly entitles you to the evidently self-applied label of ‘energy expert’? … You appear to be a deputy adjunt miller, lacking both discernible qualifications in the real world and the ability to tell a good argument from a bad one.” (Holdren to Bradley, September 17, 2003)

Some 16 years ago, I put my book writing on hold to critically review the long written record of John P. Holdren, then (and now) a Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard University. (He was President Obama’s science adviser between Harvard appointments, from 2009 until 2017.)

The result, “The Heated Energy Debate: Assessing John Holdren’s Attack on Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist,” was published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute in mid-2003.…

“The golden era of American energy is now underway.” (President Donald Trump, The White House, May 14, 2019)

… under the Green New Deal, they don’t like clean, beautiful natural gas. They don’t like anything. (President Donald Trump, “Remarks on Promoting Energy Infrastructure and Economic Growth,” Hackberry, LA, May 14, 2019)

Who has been the most free-market energy President in U.S. history? In modern times, Ronald Reagan comes to mind. He decontrolled crude oil and petroleum products in his first week of office (January 1981), although Jimmy Carter’s phase-out of such regulation had just six months to go. Reagan did some other things to undo a decade of energy statism but fell short of his election goal of abolishing the US Department of Energy. [1]

Enter Donald Trump.…

Back in 1996, the Cato Institute published the above two-volume treatise. Oil, Gas, and Government was the first (and still only) classical-liberal history of intervention in a major U.S. industry. I subsequently lectured on the book at Cato in Washington, DC and at a few other locals.

I recently ran across the outline/major points of my presentation, which I share below for those interested in the historical sweep of oil and gas regulation, tax policy, government ownership, and public grants.

To understand the perils of interventionism (particularly price controls and wartime planning), I document the coordination and problem solving in exploration/production, transmission/transportation, refining, and distribution/marketing. (Electricity, a separate energy industry, was not covered in the book.)

“Government Intervention in U.S. Oil and Gas Markets: Searching for ‘Market Failure’” (Synopsis of Major Themes of Oil, Gas, and Government: The U.S.…