“The man of system … is apt to be very wise in his own conceit, and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it…. [H]e seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.”
– Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).
A recent video is circulating where T. Boone Pickens ranted “I am the expert, not you” to land his point that falling demand, not increasing supply, is primarily behind the oil-price collapse. This outburst reminds me of the quote from the early 20th century humorist Peter Finley Dunne: “It’s not so much what he doesn’t know that worries me, as what he does know that isn’t so.”…
Continue Reading“I have observed natural resource hearings for four decades. Never has such a pervasive, activist, elitist, anti-civilization mentality so pervaded our society as that on display at this hearing.”
Earlier this week, a hearing was held by the Seattle Port Authority about the impending arrival of Shell Oil’s offshore drilling equipment, which needs a docking for its Arctic mission this season. The hearing room was packed past overflow for what turned out to be a five-hour debate.
The result will not stop Shell from arriving at Terminal 5, although four of the five commissioners asked for delays as supported by Seattle Mayor Ed Murray. A summary of the testimony from a pro-energy, pro-Alaska perspective follows.
Alaska Witnesses
Many testified. All but one (i.e. a Mat-su area environmentalist who criticized Alaska’s position on natural resource development) represented themselves professionally, presenting actual facts and history relating to the century-old relationship between Seattle and Alaska.…
Continue Reading“Even in flush economic times, carbon taxes would be bad policy. When economies are already laboring under too much spending and are at diminishing-return levels of taxation, implementing a carbon tax would be a mistake.”
– Kenneth Green, Dissecting the Carbon Tax, The American, July 13, 2012.
Open-mindedness is a mark of scholarship. And some great lights of classical-liberal social thought in the 20th century changed their minds for theoretical/empirical reasons from a utilitarian perspective.
F. A. Hayek began as a democratic socialist. Milton Friedman started as a FDR New Dealer and Keynesian. [1] Friedman later in life even moved away from his (naive) view of a fixed-monetary rule where, as he once put it, a computer program could manage the money supply. [2] Turns out that ‘money supply’ is not a fixed, known quantity; turns out that money is a government monopoly subject to politics.…
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