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March 25, 2019

The Metastasizing Distortions of Electricity Favoritism

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to meddle in energy markets. The latest tangle began when the federal government and a large number of state governments implemented policies subsidizing and guaranteeing substantial market shares for “renewable” electricity, wind and solar power in particular — technologies that are wildly uneconomic, notwithstanding ubiquitous assertions to…

February 28, 2019

USMCA Will Help Us Make the Most of Our Energy Resources

Natural resources are an important component of national wealth, and the efficient allocation and use of those resources is an economic process yielding enormous benefits for ordinary people. Also axiomatic is the reality that international trade — the movement of resources, intermediate inputs and goods and services across international boundaries in response to market signals…

January 23, 2019

The Brownsville U-turn Redux: Cartelization of the Alberta Oil Sector

The U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade promises to continue the large economic benefits of the earlier North American Free Trade Agreement, but one threat to those benefits has emerged in the form of mandated production cuts in the Alberta oil sector. For U.S. firms operating in Alberta, this policy in effect can confiscate the value of…

November 2, 2018

Nigerian Officials Learn the Hard Way About Where Money Goes

Hope springs eternal, a human inclination affecting romance, dieting, new year’s resolutions, and a good deal more. International investing is prominent among the activities often influenced by a hope that things somehow will work out, whatever the landmines known to obstruct the path toward healthy economic returns. Which brings us to the tale of Process…

October 15, 2018

Subsidies to Power Plants Are No Substitute for a National-security Plan

In an effort to deal with the market and non-market forces inflicting economic losses on coal- and nuclear-power plants, the Trump administration is seeking through regulation to force state and regional grid operators to purchase bulk power from coal- and nuclear-power producers to slow the (early) retirements of those facilities. The administration is justifying this policy on national-security grounds:…

July 25, 2018

A Critique of Mark Perry on the Trump Energy Policy

My AEI colleague Mark J. Perry has written a short essay arguing that “Trump’s Energy Policy Is Deeply Flawed,” the central themes of which are: These arguments are rather uncharacteristic of Mark, truly a first-rate economist and policy thinker. Let us begin with a first principle: The magnitude or degree of “dependence” on foreign sources of…

July 23, 2018

The Curbelo Carbon Tax as Wealth Redistribution

Environmental policy as a tool of wealth redistribution is nothing new. The latest example is a proposal for a greenhouse-gas (GHG) tax just introduced by Representative Carlos Curbelo (R., Fla.). Curbelo’s tax would start at $24 per metric ton of GHG emissions, growing 2 percent per year above inflation and an additional $2 per ton…

June 21, 2018

The Senate Finance Committee Minority on the Trump Tax Cuts and Gasoline Prices

Demand and supply. Supply and demand. That fundamental analytic framework, simple and powerful as a tool with which to examine the sources of shifts in market prices, often is forgotten in the cacophony that characterizes Beltway efforts to score political points. And increases in gasoline prices — visible every day to many millions of Americans…

May 18, 2018

The Fuel Economy Standards in Beltway Conventional Wisdom

I betray no secret when I report that reverence for the silliness embodied in conventional wisdom is a central characteristic of policy debates in the Beltway. No amount of evidence, no amount of logic, and no amount of proof showing that the earth indeed is round are sufficient to diminish the credibility of arguments that…

April 20, 2018

BP and the Earth Day Prayers of the Rent-seeking Corporation

Earth Day is upon us yet again, and it is difficult not to notice its transformation into a vehicle for corporate virtue signaling: Full-page ads in national and local print media, yielding a revenue stream for which the newspapers and magazines are sincerely grateful. Advertisements on broadcast media and heavily trafficked websites. Booths at ubiquitous…