[Editor note: This (unpublished) review of “Revisiting The Limits to Growth: Could the Club of Rome Have Been Correct After All?” by Matthew R. Simmons (1943–2010) was written by Bradley in 2000.

Tomorrow, Michael Lynch will examine the Simmons’s peak-oil advocacy. A third post will described the failed bets that Simmons made with John Tierney of the New York Times and with Bradley on the average price of oil in 2010. (Simmons bet on $200 per barrel or higher averaged over 2010–and lost resoundingly.)]

Matt Simmons founded the investment banking firm Simmons & Company International soon after the 1973 energy crisis to cater to oil companies. He first stepped out in a very public way by questioning official inventory statistics for oil. But then he took a decidedly controversial turn (and one that befuddled his longtime industry friends). …

[Editors note: This is part 3 of 4 in Alex Epstein’s exploration of innovation and creative destruction of the early oil market. Read Part 2 here. References are at the bottom. This post was originally published in The Objective Standard.]

George Bissell was the last person anyone would have bet on to change the course of industrial history. Yet this young lawyer and modest entrepreneur began to do just that in 1854 when he traveled to his alma mater, Dartmouth College, in search of investors for a venture in pavement and railway materials. 26 While visiting a friend, he noticed a bottle of Seneca Oil—petroleum—which at that time was sold as medicine. People had known of petroleum for thousands of years, but thought it existed only in small quantities.…

[Editor note: Robert L. Bradley Jr.’s book review of Charles Koch’s The Science of Success (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2007) appeared in the August/September 2008 issue of The New Individualist (Atlas Society). It is reprinted below to better publicize the worldview of the individual who has been behind a number of free-society initiatives across the country for several decades–and is now a target of Al Gore and the anti-free-market Left).

In 1859, the first treatise on “best practices” appeared: Self-Help, With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance, by Samuel Smiles. Motivational self-improvement books were not new, but Smiles’s 400-page opus was persuasive. Profusely illustrated with stories of men-made-good in industry, engineering, the arts, and music, Self-Help combined age-tested wisdom with knowledge of the industrial present.

From Self-Help to Organizational Success

Nearly 150 years later, the most recent addition to the self-help literature is The Science of Success by Charles G.…

Editor Note: This post complements a previous entry at MasterResource by Guillermo Yeatts,
Subsoil Oil and Gas Privatization: Private Wealth for the Common Good.]

Government intervention in free markets is prefaced on market failure. But no such rationale explains why federal and state governments have owned and managed hydrocarbon-bearing onshore and offshore lands. Government involvement can be explained by little more than the historical precedent of sovereign ownership of unowned property and of habit.

In a private property world, surface and subsurface areas would be unowned until the positive acts of discovery and intent to use. Under the “homestead” theory of first property title, the state of nature (unowned area) would not be the property of government but the first resource entrepreneur who, in the immortal words of John Locke, “tills, plants, improves, cultivates and can use the product of” the surface or subsurface to “enclose it from the common.”…