Liberty

Adler: Government-sponsored Prizes Would Be Better Than Subsidies

Energy markets, Liberty, Politics / By

Michael Giberson “Direct government subsidies are a particularly poor way to encourage innovation,” writes Jonathan Adler in an article asserting that government-sponsored prizes would be better than subsidies at encouraging the development of low-carbon-emission energy technologies. Government subsidies tend to be dispersed on political criteria, rewarding large, politically connected incumbent firms, rather than innovative upstarts. …

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Epsa Offers Comments on the Cato Electric Power Restructuring Editorial

Electricity, Energy markets, Liberty, Politics / By

Michael Giberson EPSA, an industry trade association for independent power generators, has also posted comments in response to the Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren editorial on electric industry restructuring. Given that their members are non-utility generators, you can imagine that they wouldn’t be too excited about the Taylor/Van Doren view that vertical integration is …

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Cato’s Jerry Taylor Responds to My Provocation

1 Comment / Electricity, Energy markets, Liberty, Politics / By

Michael Giberson Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute gives a thoughtful response to my criticisms of his editorial in the WSJ (with Peter Van Doren). He identifies two substantive arguments in my criticism and offers rebuttals, then he takes issue with my assertion that the editorial is little more than an implicit defense of the …

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Cato Institute Writers Lament the Unfortunate Loss of Vertical Integration in Electric Power Industry

Electricity, Energy markets, Liberty, Politics / By

Michael Giberson Thursday’s Wall Street Journal carried an essay by the Cato Institute’s Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren, “Short-Circuited” (available free via Cato): After a pretty good 30-year run, deregulation is on the political ropes. Although loosening the shackles on banking, trucking, and airlines delivered lower prices, robust competition and political applause, it hasn’t …

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Ftc Accidently Reveals Whole Foods Trade Secrets: Wal-Mart a Target of Whole Foods Negotiating Strategy

5 Comments / Economics, Liberty, Politics / By

Michael Giberson Attorneys for the FTC inadvertently revealed Whole Food company trade secrets when they filed documents in court that had been incorrectly redacted. (The background behind the material intended to be redacted was set to black, making it impossible to read the black text, but not hard at all to search or copy and …

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The Electric Power Retail Access Hard Core

3 Comments / Electricity, Energy markets, Liberty, Politics / By

Michael Giberson Ken Silverstein has a column about restructured retail electric power markets up at EnergyBiz Insider. He’s collected a variety of viewpoints and generally provides an update on the current state of things. He saves the fun part until nearly the end, where he quote Andrea Morrison, regulatory affairs director of Strategic Energy: With …

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Market Design As Applied Hayekian Insight

5 Comments / Economics, Liberty / By

Michael Giberson [PREAMBLE: This post is a follow-up to Lynne’s recent post, “Reconciling A Hayekian/Organic Approach With ‘Designing’ Markets.” If you haven’t already read it, I recommend reading it first. Otherwise, when I get to the part of my post where I say, “I liked D. F. Linton’s question and I liked Lynne’s answer, too,” …

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Debunking Myths About Markets

1 Comment / Economics, Liberty / By

Lynne Kiesling I frequently argue that markets provide the most effective institution for coordination of individual economic activity to improve well-being and create growth and prosperity. Market processes aggregate and transmit information among decentralized, distributed agents, enabling them to make decisions in their own individual interest while still (inadvertently) communicating information about their decisions (and …

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