“Greedy capitalism got the blame for Enron, but Enron was anything but a free-market corporation…. They were gaming the system, using politics for their own interests. That’s not free-market capitalism. That’s political capitalism.”

– Robert L. Bradley, Jr. Quoted in Leigh Brown Perkins, “Energy Surge: Robert Bradley ’77 Profile, Rollins College Magazine, Fall 2009.

The end of Enron was an unlikely new beginning for Robert Bradley ’77.

After 16 years at the energy giant, the last seven as a public policy analyst and speechwriter for CEO Ken Lay, Bradley found himself stranded when the company imploded in a firestorm of shady dealings. Like most people at Enron, he never saw it coming. “As with most Enron employees, my equity was in company stocks,” he said. “So I not only lost my job, I lost my financial cushion.…

As the battle rages over the federal debt ceiling, more pundits and even some politicians are taking a serious look at a solution that any private organization would have considered from the beginning: selling off assets to satisfy creditors.

Contrary to the doomsday rhetoric of Treasury Secretary Geithner, it is simply not true that the Congress needs to raise the federal debt ceiling, lest Uncle Sam default on existing obligations. On the contrary, large (but feasible) spending cuts, coupled with aggressive privatization of federal assets, would balance the books. There is no need to raise taxes or the debt ceiling.

The bonus to privatization is also market entrepreneurship in place of bureaucratic management. So the asset transfer would be good for both taxpayers and the private sector writ large.

I’ll outline the numbers, then focus on the possible objection to privatizing the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a topic that should be of the most interest to readers of Master Resource.…

Editor note: The first post in in this three-part series was titled A Free Market Energy Vision (Part I: Worldview); the third is“Federal Energy Policy for America (Part III: Cato’s priorities–and a few more).”

The Obama Administration has been implementing an anti-energy agenda since coming to Washington. From day one, Obama and his “dream ‘green’ team” have worked to increase the cost of traditional energy to reduce usage and try to make uneconomic consumer-rejected energy (wind, solar, ethanol, electric vehicles) more economic.

The effects of these policies are now playing out in front of the American people: rising energy prices, tens of thousands of jobs destroyed, and increasing dependence on foreign state-owned energy companies. In response, the free market community has been playing defense.

But even before Obama, multiple-hundred-page interventionist legislation has been signed time and again by Republican presidents.…

“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.

Special government favor. A little something for nothing at the other’s expense…. Sure, a particular business or industry can gain in the short run. But when everyone is getting the booty, almost all lose.

Just look where government is today. The chronic, gargantuan federal budget deficit is testament to the Enrons then, GEs now  receiving government subsidies from either the U.S. Treasury or the tax code. The rest of us pay (or will pay) what the rent-seekers are getting and not paying for (outside of their lobbying costs).…