“Increasing the affordability of both U.S. and global energy is an important economic and humanitarian objective. Policy makers heeding the time-honored healer’s maxim, ‘First, do no harm,’ should reject policies to tax and regulate away mankind’s access to affordable energy.”
It is titled Free to Prosper: Energy and Environment: A Pro-Growth Agenda for the 116th Congress. It is the work of the energy and environmental stalwarts at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the organization long led by Fred L. Smith Jr. and now directed by Kent Lassman. And as always, it is reliable scholarship to inform both sides of the political aisle.
The energy White Paper is part of a broader book, Free to Prosper. The eight areas other than Energy and Environment are Regulatory Reform and Agency Oversight; Trade; Banking and Finance; Private and Public Lands; Technology and Telecommunications; Labor and Employment; Food, Drugs, and Consumer Freedom; and Transportation That’s a lot of the federal matrix of public policy.…
“I am not claiming any great originality for the Lake County Experiment [on rural electrification in 1910]. If I had not hit upon it somebody else would have, but it is rather an interesting sidelight that even the opponents of private ownership, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, by their work have put the stamp of approval on such matters….”
– Samuel Insull, The Memoirs of Samuel Insull (1934), p. 97.
[Ed. note: This post is taken from the author’s Edison to Enron (2011), chapter 3, pp. 105–108]
“The way Insull’s utility managed Chicago’s power load,” noted one technological historian, “is comparable to the historic managerial contributions made by railway men in the nineteenth century and is as interesting as the widely publicized managerial concepts and policies of John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford.”…
Upon assuming the editorship of the Objectivist magazine Navigator, Robert Bidinotto wrote the following tribute to outgoing editor Roger Donway. Having worked with Roger over the last decade of my book projects, as well as many smaller things, I am pleased to republish Bidinotto’s salute.
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I cannot take the helm of this magazine without first paying tribute to the helmsman who has steered it so far, and so true.
I first encountered the name Roger Donway during the late 1960s, in the pages of The Freeman. His potent articles on political topics jumped out at me—not just for their rare clarity and logical rigor, but because he was one of the few among the magazine’s many authors who was clearly influenced by Ayn Rand. For a young, philosophically isolated, wannabe writer like me, Roger’s articles felt like an encouraging pat on the back—reassurance that someone, somewhere, was already able to do what I only aspired to do.…