“Ending government bailouts and corporate handouts will allow for huge, immediate, direct tax cuts — giving back desperately-needed money to American families — every year — to spend, save, or give away as they see fit.”

– Libertarian Party Website (below)

The Libertarian Party, the self-described “Party of Principle” advocating “minimum government, maximum liberty,” has a worthy stance on ending special government favor to business (cronyism). For energy policy, this would mean a long overdue contraction of the solar power, wind power, and ethanol industries. It would also be big trouble for Elon Musk’s Tesla and other electric vehicle companies.

The LP pledge is reproduced below, followed by a discussion of what the virus is, and why it should be ended.

The Pledge

If elected, I will sponsor and work diligently to pass legislation to end government bailouts, grants, loans, loan guarantees, and other handouts to private businesses; eliminate unnecessary government spending, which fuels crony capitalism; open up bidding of government contracts; and require all government contractors and their employees to agree to abstain from lobbying or from promoting or opposing political campaigns.

“No electric car since 1902, regardless of battery or drive train, had been able to compete effectively against its contemporary internal combustion counterpart.”

– David Kirsch, The Electric Vehicle and The Burden of History (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 203.

Energy history takes the wind out of the sails of the advocates of forced energy transformation. Proponents of government- enabled renewable energies must contend with the fact that for most of mankind’s (impoverished) history, the market share of biomass, wind, solar, and falling water was 100 percent. (The carbon-based energy era is only a couple of hundred years old.)

And proponents of government-enabled electric vehicles (not golf carts) must know that their technology was beat fair and square than a century ago.

Here are some quotations on the rise and fall of EVs (or EEVs–emission elsewhere vehicles).…

“Tesla is redefining ‘too big to fail’ as ‘politically correct, so bail’.”

I publish a monthly post at Forbes.com, Political Energy. My fellow scholars Michael Lynch and Alex Epstein also have columns at Forbes. All of our contributions offer the energy community and policy makers an alternative to the current government energy planning mentality.

My most recent post, “Investors Confront Tesla’s Energy Fantasy,” has just been published.  Some quotations follow:

“Musk’s various ventures have received almost $5 billion worth of government assistance. Nevada recently chimed in with $1.3 billion to incentivize Tesla to build its “gigafactory” — a new battery producing facility — near Reno.”

“Each car sold by Tesla receives a federal income tax credit of $7,500. And California allows an additional $2,500 rebate to its citizens.”

The following questions and answers were posted by The Atlas Society in conjunction with their upcoming Atlas Summit next week. Other posts at MasterResource on the philosophy of Objectivism and its application to energy can be found here.

Elsewhere, Alex Epstein of the Center for Industrial Progress is fully engaged in the climate and energy debates, employing the philosophy of Ayn Rand and her belief that truth is objective, discernible, and applicable to matters of everyday life. Through the work of Bradley and Epstein, Rand’s voice from decades ago resounds in today’s discussions of man’s need for plentiful energy.

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Five Ayn Rand Questions for Robert Bradley

1) Tell us who you are? What’s the couple of sentence summary of what you do and what you’ve done?

I am a classical-liberal intellectual, or at least a student of classical liberalism.…