“Many academics and journalists apparently don’t know the difference between a 100-year flood and an unpredictable inundation from a super storm–and the different impacts in the Plains and the Basin states.”
“A political and/or market policy solution for damages from super-storm inundations has a greater likelihood of success by substituting realism for ideology: Inundations are not the same as 100-year floods and are not the result of man-made climate change.”
Ambrose Bierce’s fable of Philosophers Three tells the story of a Bear, a Fox and an Opossum that were attacked by a flood inundation. The Bear went forward to fight the flood. The Fox thought the Bear was a fool and climbed into a hollow tree stump. However, the Opossum recognized there were evil forces at work that could not easily be confronted but also could not be avoided, so he decided to play dead.…
Continue Reading“Forced use of higher-cost U.S.-flag vessels has benefitted domestic water carrier firms, shipbuilding companies, and associated labor at the expense of consumers. This advantage, however, has been diluted because inflated shipping costs has reduced the attractiveness of barge and tanker transport compared to other alternatives.”
The Puerto Rico recovery effort has brought attention to an arcane special-interest cabotage regulation that delayed shipments to the imperiled island–and required a waiver from President Trump: Section 27 of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, [(Public Law 261, 41 Stat. 988 (1920)], commonly known as the Jones Act.
Previous posts at MasterResource (here and here) examined the history of oil-export regulation by the federal government; this post surveys the history of water-vessel restrictions from Washington, D.C. directly or indirectly impacting oceanic commerce.…
Continue Reading“Classical liberals must expose the quixotic quest to ‘save’ or ‘stabilize’ the climate and must educate the public about what is really involved: a new, powerful government lever on economies and freedom, anywhere and everywhere. Socialist central planning for economies may be intellectually dead, but global climate planning is alive and well.”
“For classical liberalism, privatizing the subsoil to enlarge and democratize wealth from Mexico to Venezuela to Saudi Arabia to Nigeria is the number one energy issue, not climate change. Yet it goes uninvestigated and unmentioned at R Street and the Niskanen Center. It might be CO2-positive, after all, not something the climate funders want to promote.”
The toxic brew of climate alarmism and climate activism (aka forced energy transformation) is incompatible with the theory and practice of classical liberalism.…
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