“There were times when Lay’s lobbying seemed at odds with his oft-stated belief in free-market solutions. A classic example was Enron’s dependence on such government agencies as the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the Export-Import Bank, which provided loans and loan guarantees for development project in the third world.”
“Like most Wall Street frenzies, the international development craze was wildly overhyped…. [S]ome of Enron International’s assets were almost comically awful, and others were fields of dreams.”
– Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, The Smartest Guys in the Room (below)
A best-selling Enron book by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, The Smartest Guys in the Room (Penguin: 2003), told of Enron’s many interactions with government. Their treatment of the subject is only the beginning, however. My forthcoming book, Political Enron: A Business History (Part I: 2016), will chronicle Enron’s unprecedented rent-seeking as a warning about the perils of a mixed economy where the worst can get on top.…
“The committee had evidence … from … a very credible witness, that about 16 years of the use of a wind turbine would be necessary before you would actually get back to the cost-benefit of the greenhouse gases forgiven as a result of the construction.”
“People say that [wind-turbine residents] are not really sick at all, that it is just in their heads. It is in their heads. You are quite right. Nausea, anxiety, annoyance, and sleeplessness are sure as hell in your head.
Let me put on the record that I am very much in favor of aspects of renewable energy…. I also want to place on the record my strong support for hydroelectricity in your state, Senator Anne Urquhart, and in the Snowy Mountains. When you can generate in the high peak periods and when you can use off-peak periods to pump water back up to generate again the next time it is needed surely has to be the ultimate value of renewable energy….…
“Beginning in late 1926, the rapid development of the large Seminole field in Oklahoma made the pendulum swing the other way. Voluntary proration was first tried with little success. Local producers appealed to the Oklahoma Corporation Commission for compulsory action. Output of one‑half million barrels per day was driving prices down, which threatened many firms.”
Mandatory proration, a government intervention restricting open‑flow production to a predetermined “market demand,” began almost simultaneously in the sister oil states of Oklahoma and Texas in 1927. Other important oil states followed – except for California and Illinois that either practiced voluntary production cutbacks or none at all. [1]
California’s free-market position did not result from free-market ideology; it was the victory of integrated Standard Oil of California (now Chevron) over the dogged mandatory-proration lobbying of their non-integrated rivals.…