“Add [to rent-seeking] the company’s rank imprudence and strategic deceit (what I labeled philosophic fraud), and a new term had to be invented to describe that which true capitalist luminaries from Adam Smith forward warned against: the contra-capitalist corporation.”

For many years now, as a poor man’s Robert Caro, I have labored to demonstrate that the worldview-testing event called Enron was Exhibit A of crony capitalism and Progressivism, not free-market capitalism and the classical liberalism.

The Progressive mainstream argued emphatically for their conclusion. Two examples are among my favorites. Paul Krugman in the New York Times: “I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.” Robert Kuttner in BusinessWeek: “Defenders of deregulation are mounting a heroic effort to insist that the [Enron] debacle was merely a business model gone bad, not an impeachment of freer markets”.…

Bradley has tackled a vast and dynamic energy landscape through the big prism of Enron. He was wise to include necessary contexts for 15 chapters of markets and personalities. Navigating FERC deregulation orders over a decade was a fearsome writing task, done well. Pipeline and power plant deals at home and abroad; solar, wind, and other alternative energies, the list goes on. Politics in Austin, Washington, DC, and foreign capitals. Enron was everywhere.

Robert L. Bradley Jr. has written a very important book about Houston’s most controversial company. This is the first of a two-volume corporate biography chronicling the rise, fall, and aftermath of Enron; his tetralogy has already produced a book on worldview (Capitalism at Work: 2009) and prehistory (Edison to Enron: 2011).

Few observers have been as ideally located to chronicle this modern-day version of a Greek tragedy.…

There was shock, surprise, and humor in the media when Trump not only denounced wind “mills” for intermittency, lack of predictable value, property losses, and bird kills but also topped his discussion with

“They say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, okay?”

Is President Trump correct in his five critical points? Even the last one? Or is it possible, as Trevor Noah suggested, turbines might be the only things that don’t cause cancer.

1. Intermittency

Electricity must be consumed the moment it is produced. Storage to allow deviations is prohibitively expensive in all but the rarest of settings. And it has always been this way.

Trump said, “Honey I’d like to watch TV tonight: are the turbines working?” And then his quotation from the Washington Republican fundraiser:

“Is the wind blowing?…

“Across the state, Texans are fighting subsidies for big renewable energy corporations. It’s an uphill battle as negotiations of these special deals under [Texas] Tax Code Chapter 312 and 313 are hidden from public view. But numerous communities are winning.”

– Texas Public Policy Foundation, “Texans Are Winning,” February 18, 2019.

The Texas wind industry has been constructed on the backs of US taxpayers, state and local taxpayers, and captive electricity ratepayers. The ruse can be traced to 1999 when an Enron-driven electricity restructuring law provided a 2,000-MW renewable-energy quota for Texas (think Enron Wind Corp.). Texas governors George W. Bush and Rick Perry were instrumental in the crony crusade, unfortunately, a story told elsewhere.

The takeoff of this politically correct, economically incorrect power source is explained by concentrated benefits, diffused costs.…