“[P]ermanence and stability are the cardinal virtues of the legal rules that make private innovation and public progress possible. To my mind there is no doubt that a legal regime that embraced private property and freedom of contract is the only one that in practice can offer that permanence and stability.”
– Richard Epstein. Simple Rules for a Complex World, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004, p. x1.
In U.S. Energy Policy and the Pursuit of Failure–and in a recent blog post at MasterResource–I have argued that for government energy policy to be effective it has to be modest—modest especially in what policy can be expected to accomplish.
But for modest policy to be effective, there must be some basic understandings about what energy policy should or should not entail.…