I expected the worst when I saw that Media Matters, the communications watchdog for the Democratic Left, had profiled my recent energy speech given to 1,000-strong at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) annual meeting. Still, I think it useful to rebut Media Matters’s Alexander Zaitchik whose report is reproduced with my parsed comments in blue.
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MM: The agenda in Salt Lake City was heavy on energy themes. Keynoting one of the luncheons was Robert Bradley, CEO of the free-market and pro-climate change Institute for Energy Research.
Comment: “Free market” is an apt term–thank you, Sir. But “pro-climate change? I have never heard that. That tricky to equate climate change with the human influence on climate, as if natural forces were not also at work.
In rebuttal, I’ll just quote James Hansen on climate change:
…“Climate is always changing.
“We will take the vision for affordable energy, common sense regulation, and safe technology to the American people; then return to Washington D.C. to deliver the message — it’s time to free the American people from costly, unnecessary regulations and bureaucracy. It’s time for Washington to untie the hands of American energy producers and manufacturers, and free these job creators to put our country back to work again.”
Freedom rings! The anti-energy eco-planners used to monopolize the not-for-profit energy dialogue. There was yours truly running the Institute for Energy Research (IER) out of my house, and Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute carrying the free-market energy torch in Washington, D.C. And then that feisty bunch at the Competitive Enterprise Institute–Marlo Lewis and Chris Horner, et al.–came on the scene.
But now our side has caught up.…
[Ed. note: Milton Friedman’s views are also explored in Part I of this series (worldview) and in Part II (energy).]
“The two greatest enemies of free enterprise in the United States … have been, on the one hand, my fellow intellectuals and, on the other hand, the business corporations of this country.”
– Milton Friedman, “Which Way for Capitalism?” Reason, May 1977, p. 21.
The above quotation is striking, not so much for the ‘fellow intellectual’ part but for ‘business corporations.’ We often think of business in the same breath as ‘free enterprise,’ right?
But on closer inspection, and with the Bush/Obama bailouts, cronyism, or crony capitalism, is in focus. And Friedman’s above Reason quotation from 35 years ago is more understandable.
I have a whole website dedicated to the subject of political capitalism.…