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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (32358)	2/14/2011 6:11:27 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 36917

>For years I was lied to that the USA is free.< And you believed it? It's actually rather expensive. It will become more so as we groan under a runaway national debt. Consider our enlightened foreign policy, which can be summarized by that timeless maxim "Do as we say. Never mind what we do." Gallows humor aside, the USA is evolving into a social democracy. Markets for some goods are freer than others. Our Tea Partier wannabe libertarians are good for employing otherwise underworked political gossip journalists, but I don't see them as a credible agency for reversing the socioeconomic trend[s]. Corn and tomatoes can be bought at competing retailers and wholesalers. No monopoly. Big firms like Heinz have purchasers who contract tomato delivery in advance and have the leverage to set the price. Actuarial math has proven weaknesses. I was not defending it, although I got a good laugh out of your fileting of them. To return to the point, I do have the right to refuse to use line current. I have the (unfunded!) right to install collateral power sources that I control. It is far less expensive for me (who does not own his own home) to buy current through the wire. My utility's price ladder is regulated by the state government, thank goodness. The closest parallel I can find to electric utilities is AT&T in the seventies. It took a government action to force the infrastructure open - definitely not a free-market event. AT&T ultimately became mooted by evolution of technology - cellular telephony. I don't see an equivalent technical revolution for house power - there's no good wireless way to get it from the plant to the home. Home generation is expensive, and it either depends on the fuels that a big power plant can use much more efficiently, or on nonfuel technology like solar or wind ... both of which are rather inconstant. Can you imagine a big city run on distributed power generation? It would not be pretty. You argue that pricing electricity from hour to hour will eliminate blackouts. I see that. I am arguing that the benefit brings liabilities that I consider to outweigh the benefit. You don't agree; indeed you don't think my points are valid. I am getting the impression that the core conflict has to do with a divergence of opinion on the inherent superiority of free markets. If that is so, I won't propagate what has acquired some features of an ideological debate.