“… knowledge is truly the mother of all resources.” – Erich Zimmermann (1951).

Thanksgiving 2020 presents an opportunity to step back and appreciate the driver of progress in the free economy: the liberated, liberating entrepreneur. The change-makers of the market drive the creation and usage of resources, as well documented by the oil and gas extraction revolution of the last decade or more.

Increasing “depletable”  resources is a paradigmatic example of what Julian Simon called “the ultimate resource,” human ingenuity. Resourceship is a term that the followers of Erich Zimmermann, from Stephen McDonald to Pierre Desrochers, have popularized to understand mineral development.

Salient quotations from seven sources follow: institutional economist Zimmermann; fellow institutionalists Wesley Mitchell and Tom DeGregori; political scientist David Osterfeld; economists Terry Anderson and Donald Leal; economist M.…

“Halloween is coming October 31st; there is no reason to normalize scares for the rest of the year.”

It is good to see David Simon in the climate sustainability debate. The son of Julian Simon (1932–1998), David is a clear voice contrasting hypothetical doom against real statistics. And it comes in the very year that John Holdren, former Obama science advisor and bitter foe of Julian, predicted as many as one billion climate deaths could occur.

MasterResource has previously highlighted David, a Chicago attorney writing as a fellow of the Washington-based Committee to Unleash Prosperity. Simon’s op-ed, “Paul Krugman Is a Global Warming Alarmist. Don’t Be Like Him” (January 16, 2020), had a zinger in the first of his six major points.

First, the earth’s temperature has been rising at a microscopically slow pace. NASA’s

Julian Simon (1932–1998) died 22 years ago this week, just short of his 66th birthday, too young by today’s standards. But Simon Lives! moments are common, with the most recent being the President of the United States telling the world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos:

“[W]e must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse. They are the heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune-tellers — and I have them and you have them, and we all have them, and they want to see us do badly…. They predicted an overpopulation crisis in the 1960s, mass starvation in the ’70s, and an end of oil in the 1990s. These alarmists always demand the same thing: absolute power to dominate, transform, and control every aspect of our lives.”

“… knowledge is truly the mother of all resources.”

– Erich Zimmermann, World Resources and Industries (1951), p. 10.

The new year presents an opportunity to step back and appreciate the driver of progress in the free economy: the liberated, liberating entrepreneur. The change-makers of the market drive the creation and usage of resources, as well documented by the oil and gas extraction revolution of the last decade or more.

But a largely invisible, ongoing application in the U.S. and elsewhere deserves more attention. Instead of futile and wasteful (government) mitigation policy, the positive approach to climate policy is human ingenuity to anticipate, mitigate, or just capitalize on changing weather patterns, aka climate change.

Increasing ‘depletable’ resources is a paradigmatic example of what Julian Simon called “the ultimate resource,” human ingenuity.…