The longtime chairman of the Cato Institute, William N. Niskanen, passed away last week at age 78. We shared the podium a few times on energy issues, and I admired his Enron project at Cato that resulted in two books, Corporate Aftershock: Lessons from the Collapse of Enron and Other Major Corporations (2003) and After Enron: Lessons for Public Policy (2005).

Like virtually everyone else who knew him, I remember Bill as a scholar and gentleman. He had one tone of voice and reliably imparted insightful logic. He was what I like to call a scholar’s scholar, role model for the rest of us.

Career

William Arthur Niskanen Jr. (1933–2011), born in Bend, Oregon, graduated from Harvard University with a degree in economics in 1954. He earned his economics doctorate in 1962 from the University of Chicago.…

“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children. It has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate.’”

     – Joe Romm, quoted in Thomas Friedman, Is the Inflection Point Near?, New York Times, March 7, 2009.

“Is there any more single-minded, simple pleasure than viewing with alarm? At times it is even better than sex.”

    —Kenneth Boulding (1970), p. 160. [1]

I know…. We free-market optimists–and we ObamaCare, ObamaEnergy, etc. pessimists–are like the chap who jumps off the skyscraper and reports that everything is breezy on the way down.

But we have been jumping off buildings ever since Robert Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on Population was published in 1798.…

The numbers are in for this year’s summer sea ice extent in the Arctic Ocean. By most measures the ice loss in 2011 came in a close second to the current and still record holder, 2007.

But the failure to set a new record for the least amount of summer Arctic sea ice observed during the satellite era (which begins in 1979) has done little to alter the overall picture of what is going on there. Summer sea ice has been in decline in the Arctic Ocean since, conservatively, the mid-20th century, and it has been picking up steam. And sea ice declines in the Arctic are now pretty clearly discernible in the other seasons as well. (What has been going on around Antarctica is a different story).

But for those who lose sleep at night over the implications of the Arctic sea ice loss to both the local, regional, and global environments, there is a silver lining.…

[Editor note: Tomorrow, economist Michael Giberson will critically assess government ‘price gouging’ laws.]

As an economist, whenever I hear the word “shortage” I wait for the other shoe to drop. That other shoe is usually “price control.”

– Thomas Sowell, “Electricity Shocks California,” January 11, 2001.

Like Bill Murray’s weatherman character in the movie Groundhog Day, the American public is obliged to relive certain bad ideas again and again (and again).

Like the movie the idea of price controls for energy keeps coming back, but will we, like Murray’s weatherman, reexamine what leads us to relive such unworkable concepts? The latest contestant in this march of folly was posted recently in the Atlantic Monthly’s business blog.

The idea–called a buffer fund–is to establish a target price for retail gasoline (diesel, too, though they seem to have forgotten that part of the fuel supply) and use taxes or subsidies to maintain the target price over time.…