“[William] Baumol was worried, however, by a very different sort of entrepreneur: the ‘unproductive’ ones, who exploit special relationships with the government to construct regulatory moats, secure public spending for their own benefit, or bend specific rules to their will, in the process stifling competition to create advantage for their firms. Economists call this rent-seeking behavior.”
– Robert Litan and Ian Hathaway. “Is America Encouraging the Wrong Kind of Entrepreneurship?” Harvard Business Review, June 13, 2017.
MasterResource covers business entrepreneurship, not only the in’s and out’s of energy history and energy policy.
Good entrepreneurship is about serving consumers in a private property, voluntary exchange, rule-of-law setting. Bad entrepreneurship is about a business receiving special government favor to advantage itself at the expense of consumers and (free market) competitors.…
Continue Reading“Will Ms. Lavelle admit that global lukewarming is a valid area of scientific inquiry and conclusion; there are benefits, not only costs, to the human influence on climate; and ‘government failure’ exists alongside ‘market failure’ in the quest to ‘do something’? Adaptation to realistic scenarios, private sector as well as public, is an alternative to–and opportunity cost of–mitigation.”
The article by Marianne Lavelle, “5 Shades of Climate Denial, All on Display in the Trump White House,” a feature at Instide Climate News (June 9, 2017), deserves a second look. The good news is that a much more useful categorization that has been offered (by Richard Mueller, below) can be used to correct the unstudied, biased five categories presented in ICN.
Here are Lavelle’s five categories:
“Until last week, Richard Nixon was responsible for the two worst-conceived American energy policies. On June 1, Donald Trump’s announcement of U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords displaced all competitors as the worst presidential initiative on energy in our nation’s history.”
– Hakes, “Quitting the Paris Climate Pact in Historical Perspective” (June 6, 2017)
“Historian Hakes got it exactly backwards. President Nixon violated economic law by imposing federal pricing on energy; President Trump removed an impetus to federal pricing for carbon-dioxide (CO2). Only if Trump had stayed in Paris would the Nixon analogy come into play.”
His bio line at Real Clear Energy reads: Jay Hakes is an energy historian who has worked for three presidents on energy issues. Experience aside, Mr. Hakes made just about the worst analogy possible regarding Donald Trump’s courageous decision to withdraw the United States from the redistributionist, toothless, ill-conceived Paris climate agreement.…
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