The blackout underscored the need to be prepared in case the grid goes down again. It is quite legal in most circumstances for any private party to buy their own generator. Most hospitals for instance keep their own private generators, almost never to be used, at a phenomenal cost for the electricity actually used, maybe I guess thousands of dollars per kilowatt hour. Similarly many better-off homeowners now buy their own generators, perhaps never to be used, so that
Regarding Paul Craig Roberts on Ricardian association and free trade: While I would not phrase the problem in quite the same way, Mr.
Aging populations tend to save more, which gives rise to complaints that this is bad for economic growth. But Chris Mayer explains that the level of “growth” should be determined by the market and the saving preferences of individuals. The real problem of aging demographics arises from the nature of a welfare state and the unrealistic pyramid scheme it represents.
It took a few days, but the view is already deeply entrenched: The Blackout Was a Market Failure (BBC). The article by Stephen Evans fails to point out few industries are so heavily regulated and monopolized as electric utilities (Krugman at least hinted at that). And he ends with a spin on Adam Smith: “The invisible hand of the market often needs a pretty strong hand of government hovering over it to stop it going terribly wrong.”
Probably the most outward sign that electricity “markets” are totally perverse and clearly not a free market is that the industry devotes large sums of advertising dollars trying to convince people to purchase less of their product.
