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Re:The Texas electric grid failure was a warm-up by roenxi on Thursday January 20, 2022 @06:30AM (#30007555)
You're going to need to spell your point out a little more than just a link. If I manage to get in a position where I'm the only person in Texas selling power in a snowstorm I'm going to die filthy rich.

That is the opposite of the collective action problem. There are enormous rewards for an actor the less other people act. Which is one of the reasons bigger corporations do disaster planning, it lets them scoop up profits when prices are higher.

Capitalists don't give up easily if there is a person willing to spend money on something. They have flaws, but motivation to provide goods and services isn't one of them.

Re:The Texas electric grid failure was a warm-up by mjburgess on Thursday January 20, 2022 @07:24AM (#30007985)
My point was that simple a-priori logic of the kind you offered regularly fails. A fast-food restaurant who wants to keeps its machines running has profit-driven feedback loops of a radically different nature than those of an energy market (esp. when such a market has natural monopolies).

And likewise, markets are amoral. If the "market" opts for a failure every decade over a higher-priced day-to-day run... this isnt "rational" or "correct" or "ethical" or whatever. The way a market happens to function is amoral.

You can make the argument that over fairly short time horizons in non-critical areas "meeting consumer demand" in most cases has a certain consequentialist justification. This doesnt carry over, a-priori to all possible cases.

Ie., it is quite reasonable for a society via a democratic expression of ethical judgement to say "the market is not here considering the long-term impact in the right ethical manner"... ie., that being without power when it's -20 outside & affecting the whole population in ways not priced in by the market is a *moral failure*.

It is the prerogative of the collective to say at once "here's how it should be", rather than via iterated interactions "here's how its happened to be".