Oil, Gas, and Government: The U.S. Experience, 2 vols.

• Author: Cowen, Tyler

The increasing professionalization of economics has largely concentrated first-rate research in the hands of professional academics, and in a few cases, government researchers and think tank employees. Gone are the days, continuing up through Keynes, when most top economists were either amateurs or part-time workers at the craft. Rob Bradley's Oil, Gas & Government: The U.S. Experience, however, resurrects the vitality of this tradition. While working outside academic circles, Bradley offers a treatise on economic regulation that is likely to remain the definitive work in numerous areas.

Bradley has a Masters degree in economics from the University of Houston and a Ph.D. from International College, but he has spent most of his life working in the energy industry in and about Houston, Texas. Through many years of diligent labor, Bradley has compiled the materials for a thorough treatment of the United States regulatory experience with oil and natural gas. The result is a 2000 page encyclopedic treatment of these topics, dense with history, analysis, and nuggets of insight. The reader will simultaneously find a work of history backed by original and primary source research, sound economic analyses of virtually every government intervention in the field, original case studies of public choice economics, and one of the best applied treatments of Austrian economics to date. The reader in search of the ambitious should pick up this book, and he or she is unlikely to be disappointed.

The author brings a definite point of view to the topic - Austrian economics with a free market slant. The book supplies microeconomic analysis and common sense rather than quantitative models, and is catholic in applying a judicious mix of Chicago School, UCLA, Public Choice, and Austrian-style arguments. Bradley states at the outset that the energy market, insofar as it has been allowed to operate, has served consumers well, and that government interventions have had the contrary effect. Such avowed advocacy is unpopular among today's academic specialists, but by the end of Bradley's two volumes it is difficult to imagine how anyone could fail to accept his arguments. Both the depth and breadth of his research put the nineteenth century German doctoral dissertation to shame.

The author pays special heed to what Ludwig yon Mises labeled the dynamic of interventionism. An initial intervention begets economic problems, which gives rise to pressures for further...