Spend the money, or we'll take it from you. Done.
This seems like the sort of belief system that inspired the story of King Canute and the tide. [0]
> Spend the money, or we'll take it from you. Done.
I understand that a lot of people only care about justifying the expropriation of wealth. But it seems you’ve forgotten to include the part where the expropriation is actually justified on the basis of promises to do something good with that money.
The electric company in El Paso, which is not part of ERCOT, did spend heavily to winterize their equipment after the 2011 cold snap. El Paso did not suffer outages this year like the rest of Texas.
Producing heat in the winter is a solved problem. If power companies are not applying the known solutions to a recurring problem, then apply state force to require them to do so. Done.
It has nothing to do with the government and everything to do with beliefs. Your post is doing exactly that. Pointing out simple facts like that all grids have been under invested in for 50 years, that we need to spend trillions to bring them up to todays standards and that we need to diversity power sources is met with derision and downvotes.
Government is not separable from the beliefs of the people who inhabit it and participate in its processes.
> Pointing out simple facts like that all grids have been under invested in for 50 years
Surely you can see that this is a belief and not a “fact”
> that we need to spend trillions to bring them up to todays standards and that we need to diversity power sources is met with derision and downvotes.
Well if people disagree then I feel it would be better for them to discuss. But it seems like there’s this perception that there is no room for reasonable disagreement and that’s what I was pushing back on.
We can agree that the grid needs more investment and still have differences of opinion on how to generate that investment.
The belief is that every American should have uninterrupted access to electricity. The fact is that we are woefully under investing to keep that state of affairs. You can have your own beliefs, you can't have your own facts.
For some reason people who want to spend less money on infrastructure don't mention that they wouldn't mind if 50% of people don't have access to roads, hospitals, or electricity.
The belief that the best way to get every American to have uninterrupted access to electricity is through public investment in infrastructure is belied by your admission that hasn’t happened. Which is a fact.
> For some reason people who want to spend less money on infrastructure don't mention that they wouldn't mind if 50% of people don't have access to roads, hospitals, or electricity.
For some reason the people who want to spend more money on publicly funded projects insist on casting aspersions rather than introspecting on why they’re always dependent on expropriation for basic things.
We have though. From 1930 to 1980 the US had a world class system that was better than any in the world.
Authoritarian government also has failures that result in millions of deaths; I’m unsure how you can be so confident that no one in Texas (of all places) would rather freeze to death than willingly accept the risk of being frozen to death by a tyrannical government that promises things then breaks promises.
To be clear this isn’t about the object-level issue of preferring starvation under one ideology to starvation under another. This is about the inability of other people to comprehend that anyone could possibly feel differently than they do about who starves you to death.
> None of us are trying to die for the glory of a sociopathic libertarian ideal.
None of us are trying to die for the glory of a psychotic marxist ideal but we still pay taxes.
These are the exact same pathology. You're drawing a distinction based on whether one is "government", but they're the same type of lethargic entrenched entity, regardless of how they were chartered.
The actual problem is the lack of accountability. The free market philosophy points us to exit as an ideal of accountability. Sometimes exit works very well - switching electric providers during quiescent times to get pricing that better matches your usage. And sometimes relying on exit fails terribly, like this rare event where it is easier to balk at obligations rather than have prepared enough to fulfill them. If we care about exit in general, then it behooves us to recognize when it fails.
One type of lethargic entrenched entity survives on the basis of consensual interactions, the other survives on the basis of economic values extracted by threats of violence. The pathology is in forcing the people who want to benefit from consensual interactions to support a system of coercion.
> The actual problem is the lack of accountability. The free market philosophy points us to exit as an ideal of accountability. Sometimes exit works very well - switching electric providers during quiescent times to get pricing that better matches your usage. And sometimes relying on exit fails terribly, like this rare event where it is easier to balk at obligations rather than have prepared enough to fulfill them. If we care about exit in general, then it behooves us to recognize when it fails.
I can agree with this.
So goes your theory, but not in actual practice. For the qualities under discussion, generation companies have seemingly acted in lockstep, therefore it makes sense to view them as a singular entity. And it's not productive to call signing up for electric service consensual in any meaningful way. The ability to technically opt out isn't worth much when it would significantly impact your life, as evidenced by the vanishingly small amount of people who do so.
You can also come at the reduction from the other direction and define how interacting with the "government" is technically consensual as well. eg don't pay taxes, do the work required to not have your income flows surveilled, etc. Or in this case, don't sign up for the (de jure) government power grid, and go your own way. Which is equivalent to what you would have had to do in the first scenario anyway - both scenarios end up with people who devoted their lives to being independent from the electrical grid being fine, and those who didn't freezing.
The point is that all frameworks ultimately have their limits - they are only good when their reasoning power holds. True understanding requires being able to switch between them as appropriate, rather than shoehorning everything into one and insisting that it must fit.
This is true.
> You can also come at the reduction from the other direction and define how interacting with the "government" is technically consensual as well. eg don't pay taxes, do the work required to not have your income flows surveilled, etc. Or in this case, don't sign up for the (de jure) government power grid, and go your own way.
This is willfully ignorant of how governments don’t let people do any of this. Being subjected to violence if you decline to participate is the opposite of consent.
> The point is that all frameworks ultimately have their limits - they are only good when their reasoning power holds. True understanding requires being able to switch between them as appropriate, rather than shoehorning everything into one and insisting that it must fit.
I agree with this and I was unclear. I mention consenting interactions because many of the people who oppose increases in the scope of state-sponsored activities prefer to source their necessities from markets. I’m aware that the tentacles of the government are long and broad and no part of the economy (least of all power generation) is free from this interference. There was probably a better way to express this in this thread.
I haven't heard of municipal light companies making it illegal to generate your own electricity or not connect your house to the grid, apart from general fit-for-occupancy laws. Similarly, the IRS doesn't have a cause of action if you deliberately earn less to pay less taxes (there is no "capitation" tax). So we can call those things consensual in a similar manner as signing up with a privately owned electric monopoly - all have narrow paths whereby you can technically go your own way.
In general for any given decree, one can always choose to to ignore it and bear specific consequences. This applies to de jure governments and de facto government alike. It takes a functioning market with many different options to diminish those consequences to the point where they can be accepted as some natural order rather than centralized diktats.
It sounds like you haven’t done much research on this but anyone who has tried to opt out quickly discovers that these things exist. For example, in many municipalities it is illegal to occupy a dwelling that is not served with electricity from the grid. Having discovered this myself because the power company refused to sell me power, because they couldn’t confirm my identity, because they only way they were willing to confirm my identity was through a credit bureau asking me about my credit history, of which for some reason they had no records, (respectfully) I’m unwilling to do the unpaid labor of searching the internet to prove something I know very well from personal experience. Suffice it to say I rented a house and was unable to legally occupy it for a week because I had to get someone else to call the power company and turn on the lights. There are laws that prevent people from opting out.
> In general for any given decree, one can always choose to to ignore it and bear specific consequences. This applies to de jure governments and de facto government alike. It takes a functioning market with many different options to diminish those consequences to the point where they can be accepted as some natural order rather than centralized diktats.
Agreed, and thanks for the reply.
You sure about that?
In my opinion this is the result of a mentality that sees the government as the obvious solution to problems, so when you see problems existing in a place where people seem to have a different philosophy of government, its clearly the fault of those morons who don’t realize that all problems can be solved by sufficient application of government force.
> if we actually want to fix things we need to stop playing these ridiculous partisan games and be honest with ourselves with the full picture of issues.
Some people actually do want to fix things on some level, but they are quite confident in their understanding of the problem and they believe that the indicated solution is clear, and anyone who doesn’t agree with them is either stupid, or evil, or both. So they’re unwilling to abandon what they see as a perfectly correct solution because a bunch of evil morons want to argue about “unintended consequences” or “agent-principal problems.”
Other people are more interested in signaling their ideological alignment with the above, and the object level issue provides them with opportunities to signal.