“Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue … the prospects of freedom are indeed dark.”
– F. A. Hayek (1949), Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (1967).
MasterResource is a free market energy blog covering green jobs, climate-change policies, mineral-resource availability, and other political economy issues. Much of our analysis gets back to a realistic view of consumer-driven markets versus government intervention (and business cronyism behind much government intervention). And that gets to critical thinkers whose timeless contributions have shaped modern arguments about freedom versus coercion.
World views and critical thinking skills are formed early. Thus it is incumbent upon our high schools–public and private–to fairly present competing ideas so that students can appreciate contrast and better understand the “middle” of the debate.…
When government tries to pick losers and winners, it typically picks losers. Why? Because in a free market, consumers pick winners to leave the losers for government.
The U.S. energy market is rich with examples. In the 1970s, synthetic fuel projects that went bust, and the Synthetics Fuel Corporation was terminated with much of its funds still unspent. In the same period, the California Energy Commission decided (see p.24) that methanol-powered (M-85) vehicles were the transportation future for their state. But advances in reformulated gasoline and onboard vehicle technology removed the benefits of converting natural gas, wood products, and coal into this transportation fuel. The methanol fad quietly went away.
EV Largesse: $2.2 billion
It seems like only yesterday that electric vehicles (EVs) were a pillar of Obama’s government-knows-best transportation strategy.…
“I can’t downplay this. It’s obviously very exciting for us…. This is opening up a new chapter in Alaska’s oil and gas history that is literally starting today.”
– Pete Slaiby, Shell Alaska. Quoted in Jennifer A. Dlouhy, “Shell Begins Drilling Well off Alaska,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 9, 2012.
Profit-seeking, consumer-directed business is proper, necessary, and heroic. Free-market-based energy enterprises (oil, gas, and coal) are quite unlike government-dependent (crony) businesses (ethanol, windpower, and on-grid solar). Ken Lay’s Enron is (was) a leading example of the latter; Koch Industries’ Charles Koch, writing in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, epitomizes the former.
Shell has scaled back its (scarcely profitable) renewable energy investments and is back to its oil and gas roots. Its advertising is no longer about pie-in-the-sky energies and more about here, now energy.…