“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.…
[Ed. note: Milton Friedman’s views are also explored in Part I of this series (worldview) and in Part III (political capitalism).]
…“Economists may not know much. But we know one thing very well: how to produce surpluses and shortages. Do you want a surplus? Have the government legislate a minimum price that is above the price that would otherwise prevail…. Do you want a shortage? Have the government legislate a maximum price that is below the price that would otherwise prevail.”
– Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), pp. 219.
“It is a mark of how far we have gone on the road to serfdom that government allocation and rationing of oil is the automatic response to the oil crisis.”
– Milton Friedman, “Why Some Prices Should Rise,” Newsweek, November 19, 1973.