“IER [and AEA] would like to work itself out of a job by depoliticizing energy so that lobbying monies can be retained by individuals, foundations, and corporations for nonpolitical purposes, thank you. With the help of the New York Times, we can do so and get the saved money to other uses.”

[Editor’s Note: Ad Hominem attacks on free-market organizations espousing industry positions are a regular occurrence, even though the same organizations oppose the same companies when they seek special government favors. This repost from five years ago remains as relevant today as then. Part II tomorrow, also a repost from April 2012, explains the philosophy behind the Institute for Energy Research/American Energy Alliance.]

The New York Times is upset with “Big Oil,” including the advocacy group American Energy Alliance (AEA).…

“[William] Baumol was worried, however, by a very different sort of entrepreneur: the ‘unproductive’ ones, who exploit special relationships with the government to construct regulatory moats, secure public spending for their own benefit, or bend specific rules to their will, in the process stifling competition to create advantage for their firms. Economists call this rent-seeking behavior.”

– Robert Litan and Ian Hathaway. “Is America Encouraging the Wrong Kind of Entrepreneurship?” Harvard Business Review, June 13, 2017.

MasterResource covers business entrepreneurship, not only the in’s and out’s of energy history and energy policy.

Good entrepreneurship is about serving consumers in a private property, voluntary exchange, rule-of-law setting. Bad entrepreneurship is about a business receiving special government favor to advantage itself at the expense of consumers and (free market) competitors.…

“Professor Dolan is invited to study the Hayek literature to see if any of the above nine points are not valid. The burden of proof is on him to try to square a classical liberal with disputed externality pricing, ‘tax-bads’ public finance, international tariffs, equity tax-dividend adjustments, and government planning.”

Yale economics PhD Ed Dolan recently attempted to link the classical liberal scholar F. A. Hayek (1899–1992) to a carbon tax in a piece published by the (misnamed) Niskanen Center. [1]

“Friedrich Hayek on Carbon Taxes” is more than unconvincing. It is shoddy. It fails to make its point and (purposefully?) neglects the obvious themes of Hayekian economics and political economy for a generic issue such as climate change.

Professor Dolan begins by admitting that Hayek never wrote anything on the subject.…

“I, therefore, juxtapose feminist posthumanist theories and feminist food studies scholarship to demonstrate how eastern fox squirrels are subjected to gendered, racialized, and speciesist thinking in the popular news media as a result of their feeding/eating practices, their unique and unfixed spatial arrangements in the greater Los Angeles region, and the western, modernist human frame through which humans interpret these actions.”

– Professor Teresa Lloro-Bidart (below)

“Trump and the climate-destroyers he brought into office with him, such as Rex Tillerson and Scott Pruitt, are not driven by compassion for victims. They are animated by a callous and rapacious search for profits for themselves and their cronies. If they cared about children killed by noxious gases, they wouldn’t want to ban Syrian refugees like the Kurds from the United States. Nor would they want to spew ever more tons of the most noxious gas of all into the blue skies of the only planetary home the human race has.”