Power Political Monopoly: Bottom Lines

By Jim Clarkson -- May 6, 2024

Ed. Note: The author has been in the trenches as a consumer and free market advocate against the monopoly utilities in natural gas and particularly electricity. His “bottom lines” follow.

“It is time to end this marriage of vested privilege and authoritarian ideology and abolish the monopoly-regulator system.”

There is no such thing as a natural monopoly; government creates all monopolies. There was never any real justification for the regulation of the utility business. The existence of utility regulation is a triumph of political entrepreneurship by the incumbent utility companies to use the power of state government to gain dominance over their customers, to eliminate their more efficient competitors and to obtain recovery on their bad investments.

The system of politicized energy distribution consumes more resources than necessary to provide service. …

Adaptation to Heat: Then and Now

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- May 3, 2024

“Getting cooled air piped into the car while enjoying a meal at a drive-in restaurant. Houston, Texas. 1957” (Texas Chronicles)

And now:

Don’t whine, adapt. Just like in the last century–and before.…

Permanent Subsidy? Industrial Wind’s PTC (14 Extensions)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- May 2, 2024

“But nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program,” Milton and Rose Friedman wrote in their 1983 primer, Tyranny of the Status Quo. And regarding government help for a developing business? “The infant industry argument is a smoke screen,” the husband-and-wife team observed. “The so-called infants never grow up.”

Industrial wind power is certainly not an infant industry, having been demonstrated as grid electricity in the nineteenth century and again during World War II. [1] But it is dilute and intermittent, fatal qualities as against fossil-fuel generated electricity.

And so although the wind interests have claimed competitiveness (actual or impending) since the 1980s, and received a lifeline subsidy in 1992 (below), the U.S. industrial wind industry is as dependent on government largesse as ever.…