US Energy Secretary Chris Wright recently summed up the new federal approach: “We are unabashedly pursuing a policy of more American energy production and infrastructure, not less.” That’s a welcome shift after four years of Washington micromanaging energy markets, imposing costly regulations, and forcing unreliable sources into the grid. 

But as someone who lives near Austin, Texas, I’ve seen firsthand that avoiding federal overreach is only part of the solution. States must also resist the temptation to control energy markets — something Texas is starting to get wrong.

Texas and California are the two largest US states by population and economic output. Their energy policies have produced starkly different outcomes. 

• California has some of the highest residential electricity rates in the country, averaging 31.8 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to 15.5 cents in Texas. 
• Texas produced 512 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2023 — more than a quarter of US generation — while California generated 194 terawatt-hours.
• California’s renewable share is 57 percent, compared to Texas’s 31 percent. 

But being more “green” doesn’t necessarily mean better. California’s grid is fragile and prone to blackouts, overreliant on intermittent sources. Texans benefit from lower prices and higher output, but Texas now leads the nation in wind generation — a title earned through decades of subsidies, not pure market forces.

That chart tells the story: Texas still delivers more energy for less money, but the policy gap is closing — in the wrong direction. Texas is in danger of losing its competitive edge by repeating California’s mistakes.

Texas Risks Becoming California

The Texas blackout during 2021’s Winter Storm Uri was a wake-up call. As energy economist Rob Bradley, policy expert Bill Peacock, and others have reported, frozen wind turbines and iced-over solar panels were unable to meet demand. Natural gas plants underperformed due to poor weatherization, and the state’s overreliance on intermittent sources magnified the crisis. 

Texas’s electricity market is not as “free” as many believe. While Texans can choose their electricity providers in a competitive retail market under the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the generation side is riddled with subsidies and political interference. 

For years, Texas’s Chapter 313 property tax abatement program was heavily favored by wind and solar projects, distorting investment decisions. But that program expired in December 2022. In 2023, the legislature passed another version of property tax abatements in Chapter 403, and voters approved a new constitutionally dedicated Texas Energy Fund, with $5 billion in low-interest, taxpayer-funded loans for new natural gas plants. This year, the legislature passed another $5 billion in subsidized loans and could soon subsidize nuclear power.

This is still political favoritism — only the fuel source changes, leaving a flawed policy intact.

Subsidies Distort Energy Markets

Subsidies heavily distort Texas’s power generation market. Federal production tax credits and Inflation Reduction Act subsidies for wind and solar drive massive overbuilding, even when those sources couldn’t meet demand during peak stress.

Now, Texas is repeating its errors with dispatchable generation — bolstering natural gas with state-backed loans rather than allowing higher market prices to attract private investment. As AIER research has shown, markets allocate resources more efficiently when prices reflect actual costs and risks. When the government guarantees a return, investors chase subsidies rather than consumer demand.

Gabriella Hoffman, director of the Center for Energy and Conservation at the Independent Women’s Forum and a recent guest on my “Let People Prosper” show, makes this point clearly: conservation and market-based energy policy can coexist, but only if the government stops trying to pick winners. Europe’s energy crisis serves as a warning about what happens when political goals take precedence over reliability and affordability.

Energy Freedom Drives Prosperity

Energy is a foundational component of economic growth. It powers manufacturing, health care, technology, and every part of modern life. Energy policy must be grounded in cost-benefit analysis and market principles — not central planning and political favors.

Secretary Wright is correct to warn that Europe’s “net zero” strategy has made energy more expensive and less reliable. The US should not follow suit, and neither should Texas. Instead, lawmakers should remove barriers to pipelines, LNG terminals, and power plants, while eliminating taxes and fees on oil and natural gas production that fund unnecessary government growth.

Living near Austin, I see every day how energy costs shape business decisions and family budgets. People continue to move here from California for lower costs and greater opportunities. But if Texas continues to copy California’s interventionist approach, that advantage will erode.

Power for the Future

Texas’s energy sector still outproduces California’s, delivering lower prices and greater reliability. But government meddling — whether for wind, solar, gas, or nuclear — threatens to undo many of these benefits. The path forward is clear:

• End all tax preferences and subsidies for every energy source.
  
• Let ERCOT’s price signals work without political interference.
  
• Approve infrastructure quickly, but without taxpayer guarantees.
  
• Let consumers and suppliers, not politicians or regulators, decide the energy mix.
  

If Texas allows people in the market to navigate freely, the state can remain the energy leader that California isn’t. This would also ensure families and businesses continue to move here for the freedom and prosperity they can’t find elsewhere. If not, Texas could find itself with California’s prices, reliability problems, and dependence on politics to keep the lights on.

Chart references:

• US Energy Information Administration (EIA). Net Generation by State (2023).
• EIA – State Electricity Profiles: Texas (2023).
• EIA – State Electricity Profiles: California (2023).
• EIA – Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.6.A: Average Retail Price of Electricity to Ultimate Customers by End-Use Sector, by State (May 2025).
• EIA – California State Energy Profile (includes Renewables Share).
• *EIA – Texas State Energy Profile (includes Renewables Share).

British satirist and cultural commentator Konstantin Kisin — author of An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West (2022) — recently shared a debate clip from Doha, Qatar, in which he made a simple observation: Slavery has existed in every human society and across the whole of human history. 

It’s a statement so uncontroversial it should have, at most, drawn some polite nods. Instead, it provoked gasps, giggles, boos, and tut-tuts from the hostile audience (see below).

This reaction reflects a troubling trend in modern discourse.

Rather than seriously engaging with arguments that challenge their preconceived ideas, many people have been so ravaged by ideological tribalism that they retreat into their comforting bubbles of confirmation bias.

In this case, Kisin’s point disrupts the one-dimensional narrative often presented in discussions on colonialism, slavery, and racial politics — a narrative reinforced in recent decades by figures like Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and Nikole Hannah-Jones.

But slavery was the global norm for millennia and existed on every inhabited continent. 

The very word “slave” originally referred to Slavic people in northern Europe, who were frequently captured by Vikings. 

The Arab slave trade operated for over a thousand years and likely enslaved as many as 18 million people, as compared to 12 million over about 400 years for the Transatlantic slave trade. It was also often far more brutal. Male slaves were routinely castrated using barbaric and unsanitary methods that led to the painful deaths of between 60-90 percent of them, according to historians such as Bernard Lewis, Murray Gordon, Jan Hogendorn, and Marion Johnson.

Barbary pirates from North Africa enslaved perhaps a million Europeans, in addition to millions of other Africans, between the mid-1400s and the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the US destroyed much of the pirates’ capacity to capture slaves during the First and Second Barbary Wars.

Slavery was widespread across Asia as well — India, China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, and Mongolia all have significant histories of enslavement, and the practice still persists in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and China today. 

To place sole blame on Europeans as many leftists do betrays profound ignorance and an utter disregard for reality.

As Kisin correctly pointed out, it was in fact the West — particularly Britain and the United States — that ultimately led the global effort to abolish slavery. 

The abolitionist movement was born from the same philosophical ideas that informed America’s founding, typically coupled with the evolving religious viewpoint that all human beings deserve to be treated with dignity and grace as they are all part of God’s creation.

Given that fact, it’s unsurprising that one of the earliest organized objections to slavery came from Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1688. 

Four men — Francis Daniel Pastorius, Garret Hendericks, Derick op den Graeff, and Abraham op den Graeff — wrote a petition invoking the principle, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” challenging society’s acceptance of enslavement. Over the eighteenth century, Quakers increasingly barred slaveholders from their congregations and lobbied governments to outlaw the practice.

Enlightenment philosophers provided a broader intellectual foundation. 

John Locke’s theory of natural rights — “life, liberty, and property” — strongly influenced Thomas Jefferson and the entire structure of America’s Constitution and Bill of Rights. David Hume, Montesquieu, and Adam Smith critiqued both the morality and economics of slavery. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith argued that slavery was not only unjust but also economically inefficient: 

“The work done by slaves… comes dearer to the master than that performed by freemen.”

These ideas fueled some of history’s most remarkable anti-slavery campaigns. 

British Abolitionists such as William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, and Granville Sharp wove those Enlightenment ideas and Christian teachings into effective advocacy, while firsthand accounts amplified the call for change. Former slave Olaudah Equiano documented the horrors of enslavement and the promise of liberty. He worked with Thomas Clarkson, who collected evidence of the trade’s brutality to persuade the public and Parliament. 

As Clarkson famously wrote, 

“We cannot suppose that God has made such a difference between us and them, as to intend one part of mankind to be the perpetual slaves of another.”

Thanks to their efforts, Britain abolished the slave trade across its vast empire with the Slave Trade Act in 1807.

Abolition was neither cheap nor politically expedient.

Britain spent the modern equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars enforcing abolition, tasking the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron with hunting down slavers, sinking their ships, demolishing their slave ports, and freeing the men and women enslaved there. Over a period of a few decades, they seized over 1,600 slave ships and freed at least 150,000 Africans. They also paid an enormous amount of money as compensation to slaveowners under the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, in exchange for more peacefully ending the practice where they could.

William Wilberforce, who championed abolition in Parliament for decades, finally witnessed his life’s work realized just days before his death in 1833.

Meanwhile, the United States’ founders grappled with the same moral questions. 

America’s relationship to slavery was more complicated but still deeply informed by the same Enlightenment principles. At the Constitutional Convention, slavery was one of the most divisive issues. Northern states were already moving toward abolition. Several southern states had begun phasing it out or restricting the trade. 

But even the strongest voices for abolition among the Founders, such as Benjamin Franklin and John Adams recognized that pushing total abolition in that moment would have broken the union in its infancy, negating their hard-won fight for independence. Instead, they deployed mechanisms like the Three-Fifths Compromise — which, contrary to many people’s mistaken understanding, was a way to reduce the political power of slave states within the federal government. 

Even some of the slave-owning Founders such as George Washington (who inherited slaves from his father and his wife Martha’s family) viewed slavery as morally abhorrent, writing “I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it,” in a letter to Robert Morris in 1786.

Hypocrite though he may have been, Washington also freed the 123 slaves he owned at the time of his death. It’s worth noting that this was the only example of such a large-scale emancipation in Virginia at the time.

The moral tension between human dignity and political expediency was always inescapable — and it percolated for decades. 

Abolitionist voices grew louder, from Frederick Douglass to Sojourner Truth. Eventually, that tension exploded in the form of the Civil War — the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history. And at its conclusion, the Thirteenth Amendment finally abolished slavery in 1865, making America one of the first nations in the world to do so.

The West’s confrontation with slavery was imperfect but principled. It was driven by ideas valuing human dignity, liberty, and moral responsibility. These efforts demonstrate that moral courage, grounded in reason and ethics, can reshape societies.

The lesson remains relevant today. Ideologically blinkered presentism has compelled a huge number of people to reduce the complex reality of these issues to a moral black and white built almost entirely on falsehoods.

But recognizing the historical scope of slavery, the complexity of its abolition, and the immense human cost involved should not be a matter of ideology; it is a matter of truth. Understanding this history equips us to engage with moral and political questions more thoughtfully and to appreciate the principles that helped dismantle one of humanity’s darkest institutions.

A recent report from The Heritage Foundation argues that “the wealthy” are not “idle idols” but are instead owners and investors of wealth-creating ventures. Through their ownership of productive assets, they are the driving force behind overall wealth creation in the country and, in some cases, the world.  The report reveals a crucial truth that is often lost in today’s political rhetoric: the overwhelming majority of American wealth among the most wealthy (88.2 percent) consists of assets linked directly to businesses and economic production. Despite the commonly accepted belief that millionaires hold their money in real estate or “yachts, sports cars, private planes, gold bars, and jewelry,” most of that wealth is investment, not consumption goods.

Building on this important truth, we emphasize two additional insights that may inform our current policy debates, particularly as the Trump administration seeks to expand government ownership stakes in private companies.

First, we must acknowledge that capitalism, for all its flaws in practice, is fundamentally a system that rewards serving others, not exploiting them. Look at Henry Ford: he benefited tremendously from figuring out how to mass produce cars such that the common man was able to afford a vehicle. But I submit to you that, while he became fabulously wealthy from his innovations, the real winners of this exchange were people like you and me. Everyday Americans received better access to transportation, fundamentally transforming our lives. People like Ford already had access to this then-privilege, so while he may command more wealth as a result of his efforts, the efforts themselves improved our lives much more than his.

The people who create medical treatments and vaccines against disease also often become wealthy. But when people all around the world are freed from contracting diseases, enjoying a fundamentally better and happier life, the wealth gained by their inventors seems small. 

Or think of tech moguls like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Tim Cook. By bringing computing power to the masses, they fundamentally transformed the way we all live our everyday lives.

Consider this ad for computers from 1990:

In today’s dollars, these items would cost $6,590, $2,533, and $5,829, respectively. Also in 1990, the average nominal pay for the whole United States was $23,602, meaning that the average person would have to work 220 hours, 84 hours, and 194 hours respectively, to buy these items. Today, with an average wage of $36.44 ($72,880 annually), the hours worked to afford these items (at their 2025 prices) would be 181, 70, and 160.

But we wouldn’t be buying computer equipment from 1990, anyway. Computer prices have actually fallen dramatically. At the time of this writing, a comparable baseline iMac costs $1,299 (35 hours of work).  The latest LaserJet printer from HP costs $169 (4.6 hours).  IBM sold its computer hardware division to Lenovo in 2005, and a Lenovo desktop computer now costs $859 (23.5 hours). Even if we ignore the massive improvements in quality and the explosion of computing power contained in those devices, computing power has never been more affordable. Millions of careers were transformed by the efforts of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, and everyone else from engineer to assembly line at Microsoft and Apple. And while the CEOs and employees of these companies have surely become wealthier, the real winners of the innovations are everyday people like you and me.

In a free society characterized by capitalism, wealth is generated by serving others. Those who can best serve others — and consume less than they generate — find themselves amassing what we define as “wealth.”

The second lesson we can glean from the Heritage study is what the ultra-wealthy actually do with the wealth they amass. Nearly 90 percent of their fortunes are tied up in productive economic activity, not luxury consumption. Only three percent of the top one percent’s wealth is in consumer durables — things like cars, furniture, and jewelry. For the bottom quintile, that ratio is likely to be 15-20 percent.  

Far from being “idle rich,” the wealthy invest their fortunes, providing the capital necessary to fund increased economic activity. For the rest of us, that means more jobs, more production, and better access to the goods and services that enable us to live healthily and wealthily, however we choose to define these terms.

That investment cycle also helps explain why “eating the rich” is a recipe for disaster. Sticking the rich with exorbitant federal taxes can only mean that wealth is removed from productive economic uses to pay for public sector malfeasance. Policymakers are not taking gold coins out of a swimming pool à la Scrooge McDuck, they’re taking investments out of the private sector. The loss of capital impacts not the rich, primarily, but the prosperity that the rest of us have come to enjoy and depend upon.

The reality is that the wealth of the wealthiest people in America largely represents the market’s assessment of their ability to continue serving their customers in the future. As new information comes to light, this assessment can and does change. Tesla, for example, started off white-hot, with stock prices skyrocketing. But lately, after the abysmal launch of the Cybertruck and delays in its production and delivery, combined with some of Musk’s stupendously bad investments, the market has revised its assessment of Tesla downward.  As a result, Musk has lost more than $80 billion in wealth thus far in 2025 alone.

This brings us to a troubling development: President Trump, Congressional Republicans, and members of the so-called New Right have recently floated the idea that we should tax the rich more. Even more alarmingly, these same people hold that the federal government should take equity stakes in private companies. This is a fundamental departure from the principles that allowed for the creation of the wealth policymakers now wish to strip away, and a complete rejection of lower-tax, small-government Republicanism.

President Trump is “taking a 10 percent stake in Intel,” making the federal government the single largest stakeholder of the company. Earlier this year, the sale of US Steel to Nippon was approved, contingent on the US government receiving a “golden share.” While Trump is in office, this golden share is held by the President (i.e. Donald Trump), and after he leaves office, it will revert to being held by the Treasury and Commerce Departments. Importantly, while he is in office, the President will have veto power over some production and wage decisions. Not wishing to be left behind, the Pentagon is taking a 15 percent stake in MP Materials, a producer of rare-earth magnets, among other things.

All of this shifts the nation away from the capitalism that created an economy (and indeed, society) the likes of which has never been seen in human history and toward the type of capitalism found in, say, China. Trying to “out-China” China is a fool’s errand.
The reality is that economies, societies, and the nation itself are best served when individual people are given the freedom and tools to succeed, not when government bureaucrats pick winners and losers. In a free-market, capitalist system like the one the US for the most part enjoys, the best way to serve oneself is by serving others.