Actually, as I recall, Sam Insull went to prison because he was a major player in the holding company markets, where they held no assets except for equity positions in other companies (can you say CMGI, ICGE..??). When the underlying assets collapsed in the market crash, his holding companies collapsed as well.
Kinda like mutual funds seeing their net worth collapse over the past year.
And btw, I can see a role for government in providing inducements for long-term power solutions. But we have to make a decision. We either have to competely nationalize the power grid, put it under government control (and thus give politicians the power to decide who receives more generation -economic growth- than another part of the nation), or we have to completely privatize it, providing tax incentives to private industry to build generation in certain parts of the nation that we would like to see economically grow.
TVA was a prime example of this governmental power to solve problems (flood damage from the Tennessee river), while providing ready power that is the basis for economic growth (jobs).
I prefer the government targeting subsidies to private power generators to build in certain areas of need, and not meddling too much in the markets. And I prefer the government targeting subsidies to long-term power generation, like nuclear, where once you build the capacity, you have 40-60 years to fully develop and exploit the potential of that new generation capacity.
Only government has the resources necessary to say.... "that area is underveloped so if we build a couple of large nukes, or hydro plants there, we can develop the entire region".
Or they say.... "We need to reduce our reliance on foreign oil because the nation security implications. Let's build a bunch of Nukes, use the power to produce large quantities of hydrogen, and then fully develop the vehicular fuel-cell markets".
That's what government is for... Operating where private market can't to set overall future trends.
Hawk |
