AIA Launches Econ Text

Accuracy in Academia will feature Troy University professor Chris Warden, author of the forthcoming Voodoo Anyone? Economics for Journalists, which AIA is publishing, in a special book forum at the National Press Club on July 30.

At a time when gas prices have hit record levels, our national brain trust among the journalistic and academic elite offers up a series of explanations for the cost hike that could charitably be described as inadequate. Thus, their focus on “greedy oil companies” fails to account for:

• The proportion of the price per gallon that goes towards taxes—federal, state and local—as well as the cost of regulation;

• The failure to build an oil refinery in the past three decades;

• The number of refineries that closed down when Congress passed the Clean Air Act of 1990, which the late author Warren Brookes dubbed “a billion-dollar solution chasing a million-dollar problem”; and

• The prohibition on coastal drilling in place for the past quarter century, although apparently this fiat only affects American companies: Communist China is now drilling for oil 45 miles off the U. S. coast—well within the 200-mile limit of this country’s waters.

To this bill of particulars, we can add another mystery. We frequently hear, from presidential candidates and other such nomenklatura, that it would take ten years to extract oil from the outer continental shelf and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where statutes now prohibit exploration for same.

The question is: how much of that decade is spent drilling, packing, shipping and distributing versus filling out paperwork to meet the demands of litigation and regulation? Some in the oil business point out that the former set of activities, traditionally associated with the petroleum industry can take days, weeks, even months while the latter collection of chores may take years.

If there is a bipartisan failure to acknowledge, or even recognize, all of the above, it stems from the manner in which students are taught, particularly undergraduates and graduates in journalism programs. For this reason, AIA is publishing Warden’s user-friendly text.

The author is ideally suited to the subject matter. A recently tenured journalism professor at Troy State University in Alabama, Warden served for many years as the editorial-page editor of Investor’s Business Daily.

Before joining IBD, Chris ran The National Journalism Center, serving under NJC founder M. Stanton Evans. We will be featuring Chris in a special AIA author’s night/press conference at the National Press Club on July, 30, 2008 from 6:30-8:00 PM.

If you are in the Washington, D. C. metropolitan area on that day, we would love to see you there.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.