Irwin Stelzer has a PhD in economics from Cornell and decades of experience in academia, the financial world, and public policy. He is a frequent columnist in right-leaning outlets and was the editor of the 2004 The Neocon Reader. As such, readers may have taken Stelzer very seriously when he recently argued in The Weekly Standard that conservatives should support a carbon tax because it would (he claims) be good for economic growth. Yet as I’ll show, Stelzer’s article shows that he is unfamiliar with the technical literature in this area, and moreover, displays a shocking naïveté about how government grows.
