“Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won… Capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism.”
– Robert Heilbroner, “The Triumph of Capitalism,” The New Yorker, January 23, 1989, p. 98.
A major event in the history of political economy thought occurred in 1989 when socialist economics writer Robert Heilbroner (1919–2005) renounced his belief in central planning in the pages of the New Yorker. For anti-market liberals, this made it official: socialism was out of the mainstream. Socialism could not plan a modern economy and was an open sesame for totalitarianism. Hayek said as much in his 1944 classic, The Road to Serfdom. A trusted voice on the Left confirmed it 45 years later.…
Continue Reading“[There is] a general economic maxim: public [government] resources are really private, owned and exploited by a political elite, while private resources are really public, owned and managed by a multitude. Government-owned resources do not ‘belong to all of the people’ and allow ‘self determination;’ they belong to none or a very few.”
– R. Bradley, Foreword to G. Yeatts, Subsurface Wealth: The Struggle for Privatization in Argentina (Foundation for Economic Education, 1997), pp. xv–xvi.
The recent reform of Mexico’s Constitution to allow private investment (up to $20 billion in production-sharing agreements) still leaves state-owned PEMEX with a legal monopoly for oil and gas development inside the country. But it is a start at reform that may turn into a deregulatory, privatization dynamic.
More, indeed, awaits to open the energy sector internal and external competition and to foreign investment in any amounts:
1) Competition to PEMEX in all oil and gas areas should be legalized;
2) PEMEX shares be allocated to the country’s private citizens;
3) Subsoil mineral rights should be assigned–with deed of title–to the (private) surface owners of land.…
Continue Reading“When the history of the global warming scare comes to be written, a chapter should be devoted to the way the message had to be altered to keep the show on the road. Global warming became climate change so as to be able to take the blame for cold spells and wet seasons as well as hot days. Then, to keep its options open, the movement began to talk about ‘extreme weather’.”
– Matt Ridley, “Nobody Even Calls the Weather Average,” July 9, 2013.
Last summer, global warming was blamed for firefighter deaths, more thunderstorms, and poor lobster catches.
Last fall and so far this winter, the list has grown to include: