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How the Free Market Rocked the Grid
sean_nestor sends in a story at IEEE Spectrum that begins:
"Most of us take for granted that the lights will work when we flip them on, without worrying too much about the staggeringly complex things needed to make that happen. Thank the engineers who designed and built the power grids for that — but don't thank them too much. Their main goal was reliability; keeping the cost of electricity down was less of a concern. That's in part why so many people in the United States complain about high electricity prices. Some armchair economists (and a quite a few real ones) have long argued that the solution is deregulation. After all, many other US industries have been deregulated — take, for instance, oil, natural gas, or trucking — and greater competition in those sectors swiftly brought prices down. Why not electricity?"
That's not free market if there's companies tacking on random fees and trying to nickel and dime you. You misunderstand "free market", as most of the other people in this country do. You force competition, based on the rate of purchase, and if there's any additional fee, it's regulated to be the same between all companies.
it has failed but none of where it has succeeded.
- you are ignorant, that's the way the current gov't system wants you to be.
USA, 19 century, the country had unprecedented growth of wealth, the quality of life for all people went up dramatically, over that century (and before the creation of the Fed) the dollar gained in value by a factor of 2 (compare to the 20th century since the Fed was created with a mandate of price stability - it failed miserably, the dollar lost value by a factor of over 20).
The system that is not controlled by gov't is known to work very well, it's when gov't starts taking over the economy that the system starts failing eventually, especially if the economy that was taken over was very strong, so gov't could grow immensely, eventually killing the host economy by its uncontrollable growth. Gov't is a spending item, it does have reasons to exist (minimum military, justice system, cops/prisons) but when it gains ability to print money and get unlimited debt, it eventually gains too much power and destroys the host economy and society.
I am not talking about any 'perfect' system either, the 19 century wasn't perfect, but it was an excellent showcase of staggering growth of quality of life, change of economy from agrarian to industrial, creation of the middle class, eventual growth of wealth and fall of prices, that allowed quality of life to increase, new various economies to be created around the industrial one, innovation was accelerating, science was driven forward by the need of more capable engineering.
Today USA is burning through the last ounces of credit that is left over from that earlier system, eventually the US bond bubble will burst, just like the housing before it and the internet before it, all created and fed with 'free' gov't money and debt and destruction of capital by the gov't agenda of creating and maintaining monopolies.
USA will fall and eventually will have to be rebuilt, and it's not going to be any gov't power that will rebuild it, it will be just like always - private interest.
You can't handle the truth.