“We are fast approaching the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission.” (Ayn Rand)
“What the bill is really about is giving more artificial advantage to electric vehicles over the internal combustion engine. Higher the prices, the better, while deflecting the blame to Big Oil.”
When it comes to energy, the California government has termite aspirations. Having wounded its electricity grid with centrally planned wind and solar reliance, the state is legislating vile-and-spite toward the mainstays of the transportation sector: gasoline and diesel.
Consumer preference for the most affordable, plentiful, dependable energies? No standing in this state. Taxpayer neutrality? Absent. Government knows best, with today’s intervention adding to the issues created by prior intervention.
Already, taxes and other mandates have made the Golden State’s pump prices the highest in the country: $4.83/gallon, almost 40 percent higher than the national average.…
H.R. 1 can be characterized as pro-free market and deregulatory. But it is only a start. Free market reforms will ultimately require repealing dusty old federal laws from the New Deal (Public Utility Holding Company Act; Federal Power Act; Natural Gas Act) and laws before and after…. At the same time, numerous states should implement free market reforms by repealing and amending laws.
The Lower Energy Costs Act just passed the U.S. House of Representatives with bipartisan support. Senate confirmation is not expected to pass it, and the Biden Administration has promised a veto. But it is a start, a placeholder, for pro-consumer, pro-taxpayer, pro-freedom policy reform to come.
H.R. 1, in the words of its sponsors, “restores American energy independence by:
A summary of the Bill follows:
…H.R.
Ed. note: The loss of impartial intellectual inquiry and scholarship at Harvard University continues, as indicated by an upcoming article in Harvard Environmental Law Review, Vol. 48, No. 1, 2024, “Climate Homicide: Prosecuting Big Oil For Climate Deaths.” Given this trend, the contributions of a pioneering Harvard business historian, who also broke through the ranks of a male-only faculty, are worth revisiting.
“What we have done is … to put business in its broader political and cultural setting…. We are not out to defend business, but to try to do an impartial, scholarly investigation of an important American institution.”
– Henrietta Larson (1894–1983), Harvard business historian
For many decades, corporate histories were dominated by simplistic notions of big-is-bad and capitalist exploitation. Ida Tarbell documented many innovations and economies from John D.…