“Milton Friedman’s timeless energy insights should be appreciated for all time.”

Born on this day 106 years ago, free-market economist Milton Friedman (1912–2006) was one of a kind. Even the dyspeptic Paul Krugman called his rival “the economist’s economist…a very great man indeed—a man of intellectual courage who was one of the most important economic thinkers of all time and possibly the most brilliant communicator of economic ideas to the general public that ever lived.” The Economist (November 23, 2006) called him “the most influential economist of the second half of the twentieth century… and possibly all of it.”

Milton Friedman’s major professional mark was in monetary economics. But as a public intellectual, writing popular books and a biweekly Newsweek column, he became conversant in different fields, including energy.

Friedman understood how, for much of US history, major energy regulation was sponsored by some segment of the industry.…

“Mr. Anderson and the Energy and Policy Institute marginalize themselves by assuming what must be debated. Thinking persons want to know about tradeoffs: economic and environmental. And what about the fact that Tom Stacy has been and mostly is a volunteer for his cause, unlike Anderson who gets a nice full-time, six-figure salary for his?”

It is strange to read a perfectly normal, accurate biography of someone only to realize that the other side is using facts to try to smear someone for doing a sensible thing.

And for Tom Stacy, that “thing” is pushing back at the grassroots level against monstrous industrial wind turbines that are environmentally invasive, anti-consumer, and anti-taxpayer.

Yet mainstream environmentalists, favoring high prices and less reliability for the master resource of energy, not to mention environmental energy sprawl, pretend that there is an inherent social good in renewable energies that are inferior in every which way.…

“If he is elected president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador should not just tolerate but champion Mexico’s energy reforms. Confidence will lead to greater foreign investment into oil, increasing the capital stock of the host country to result in higher oil production.”

The front-runner for the Mexican 2018 election (scheduled for July 1) is Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO for short). The former mayor of Mexico City has been runner-up in the past two presidential elections.

Due to his leftist and populist leanings, AMLO’s political opponents have claimed he will be the Mexican Hugo Chavez. Although he claimed in 2016 that he would seek to cancel contracts signed under the Mexican energy reform of 2013–2014, his position now seems to have calmed to where an authoritarian cancellation is very unlikely.

Background

The Mexican energy reforms of 2013-14, associated with the current president’s “Pact for Mexico,” allows foreign companies greater participation in Mexican oilfields.…