A death announcement last week in the Houston Chronicle caught my eye. I never met the late Stephen Simon, but what I read made me realize that the quiet heroes and heroines of free-market capitalism need to be saluted now and then. For they are the wealth creators and real philanthropists versus the political system’s wealth redistributionists and wealth destroyers.

Here is the essence of this man. An engineer. More than 40 years with a major energy company in a variety of advancing positions at home and abroad. Successful. Private sector philanthropist with his time and money.

And through it all, a “heroic capitalist” in the Smith-Smiles-Rand tradition (see Part I of my Capitalism at Work). A practitioner of Principled Entrepreneurship ™.

Think of what Julian Simon would have said about Stephen Simon (no relation): He created more than he consumed to leave us resource richer.…

“A reliable and affordable supply of energy is absolutely critical to maintaining and expanding economic prosperity where such prosperity already exists and to creating it where it does not.”

– John Holdren, “Memorandum to the President: The Energy-Climate Challenge,” in Donald Kennedy and John Riggs, eds., U.S. Policy and the Global Environment: Memos to the President (Washington, D.C.: The Aspen Institute, 2000), p. 21.

Julian Simon (1932–98) is an inspiration to many of us here at MasterResource. Indeed, this blog is named for Simon’s characterization of energy as the master resource. In honor of Simon, I have reproduced some quotations from the vast literature on that theme.

The primal importance of energy is recognized across the political spectrum as the views of John Holdren, Paul Ehrlich, and Amory Lovins attest. Affordable, reliable energy is thus the starting point for public policy debate.…

“Enron Lives! in Waxman-Markey. The sooner the public, media, and intelligentsia realize this, the faster cap-and-trade can be put in the dustbin of bad ideas.”

– Cap-and-Trade: The Temple of Enron, MasterResource, May 14, 2009.

Joseph Romm holds a Ph.D. (in physics) from MIT and works for a 501(c)3 foundation. Being highly educated and in the education business, to most of us, means being careful and fair in our arguments–and avoiding reckless ad hominem argument. But not so with Joe as evidenced by his very inaccurate recent post against me.

In “George Will and WattsUpWithThat embrace a proud former shill for a man convicted on fraud and conspiracy charges,” Romm argues that I must be corrupt because of my former association with Enron and Ken Lay–and thus George Will and the mega-site WattsUpWithThat are party to corruption too.…

I have previously described Exxon Mobil as the anti-Enron. In an opinion-page editorial in yesterday’s Houston Chronicle, I contrasted the two companies in terms of both energy strategy and public policy.

More could be said than is in the editorial (reprinted below). Enron’s first fraud, engineered by Andrew Fastow, came with the purchase of Zond Corporation, which was renamed Enron Wind Corporation and is now part of GE Energy. (This complicated story about a “qualifying facility” under federal energy law is told in McLean and Elkind’s The Smartest Guys in the Room, pp. 166–67 and Kurt Eichenwald’s Conspiracy of Fools, pp. 142–44.)

Enron Energy Services, the energy outsourcing division of Enron that so excited environmentalists (including Joe Romm, now blogging at Climate Progress), was one of the company’s biggest frauds.…