“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.…

Seven score and nine years ago, President Lincoln spoke about government of the people, by the people, and for the people.  Yet, today, our lives are determined not so much by We the People, as by a distant central government, particularly increasingly powerful, unelected and unaccountable executive-branch agencies.

Consider the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), arguably the most intrusive administrative agency of all. Under Administrator Lisa Jackson, we have, at best, government of, by, and for some people. Or in the words of one public-choice economist, a government “of the Busy (political activists), by the Bossy (government managers), for the Bully (lobbying activists).” [1]

Secretary Jackson seeks not merely to regulate, but to legislate; not merely to protect our health and environment against every conceivable risk, but to control every facet of our economy, livelihoods and lives.…

Josiah Neeley

Economists are famous for disagreeing among themselves. Yet on the subject of free trade, economic opinion speaks almost with one voice. In a recent survey, 87.5 percent of PhD members of the American Economic Association agreed that “the U.S. should eliminate remaining tariffs and other barriers to trade.”

As Paul Krugman (not exactly a proponent of laissez-faire) has stated, “if there were an Economist’s Creed, it would surely contain the affirmations ‘I understand the Principle of Comparative Advantage’ and ‘I advocate Free Trade’.”

Indeed. Since the days of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, economists have been tireless in demonstrating the role free trade plays in promoting prosperity and harmony for all nations.

Yet the economic consensus in favor of free trade has not always been heeded.…

“We can’t drill our way out of our energy problem.” This oft-repeated mantra may have superficial appeal. However, on closer examination, it reflects an abysmal grasp of energy and economic facts by special interests that exert far too much influence over U.S. policies.

If only their hot air could be converted into usable energy.

Drilling won’t generate production overnight. But it will ensure steady new supplies a few years hence. Unlike electricity generation from wind and solar, hydrocarbon development is not an intermittent process. It is 24-7 every month, every year.

Simply announcing that America is finally hunting oil again would send a powerful signal to global energy markets. It would also tame speculators, many of whom bet that continued U.S. drilling restrictions will further exacerbate the global demand-supply imbalance and send prices even higher for “futures” (under which a person pays a specific amount today, with the expectation of selling a commodity on a future date at a higher price).…