Ep. 77 Rob Bradley on His Contributions to Energy Economics, Rothbard as Dissertation Chair, and Enron as a Postmodern Corporation
Rob Bradley is the world’s leading expert in energy economics in the Austrian tradition. His treatise Oil, Gas, and Government is the definitive record of U.S. government intervention in the oil & gas markets. Rob chose Murray Rothbard as the chair for his dissertation in Political Economy. At one point in his career, Rob served as a speechwriter for Ken Lay, CEO of Enron, which afforded Rob a firsthand view of the skullduggery that would later be wrongly blamed on capitalism.
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Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest:
- The YouTube video of this interview.
- Bob’s introductory essay to Rob Bradley’s classic work (which was his dissertation under Rothbard), Oil, Gas, and Government: The U.S. Experience.
- Bob’s article in the Journal of Private Enterprise which relays the “daisy chain” story of how oil resellers gamed the price controls during the 1970s.
- Rob’s website devoted to energy issues: MasterResource.org. The website for the Institute for Energy Research, which Rob founded.
- Rob’s trilogy on cronyism (“political capitalism”) in industry: (1) Capitalism at Work, (2) Edison to Enron, and (3) Enron Ascending. #CommissionsEarned (As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)
- How you can contribute to the Bob Murphy Show.
The audio production for this episode was provided by Podsworth Media.
About the author, Robert
Christian and economist, Chief Economist at infineo, and Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute.
Very interesting. I look forward to armies of ‘blue collar scholars’ publishing industry specific histories from an Austrian perspective.
Hearing about the various ways people gamed the oil subsidy system makes me propose a corollary to Burhams 5th Law (Wherever there is prohibition there is a bootlegger) – namely ‘wherever there is a handout, there is a scammer’.
(See https://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/2006/09/tt-burnhams-laws.html for all 10 of Burham’s Laws.)
Good podcast. Also reveals Ken Lay and Enron as early rent-seekers who helped promote the “Global Warming” hysteria in order to make money from “carbon markets”.