COLD TRUTH – THE TEXAS FREEZE IS A CATASTROPHE OF THE FREE MARKET
JAMES K. GALBRAITH
Comments by Charles H. Sulka
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Galbraith give us an eminently readable analysis of this crucially important issue, and he does so without resorting to econo-speak. It would be hard to imagine a better example of the dismal reality that is laissez-faire capitalism than the recent cold freeze in Texas.
Over the past decade over 18,000 companies have relocated from the high-tax-rate state of ‘socialist’ California to Texas, a ‘free market’ state which has zero personal income tax. Even the dullest economist understands this market reality: you get what you pay for. As all these emigres from the Golden State shiver in the sub-freezing temperatures without light or heat or water to flush their (frozen) toilets, many are probably reconsidering the wisdom of moving to the Lone Star State — a state which has turned what were already some of the worst public utilities in the nation into a free-market free for all. The Texas power grid was a disaster waiting to happen … and it happened.
And it will happen again. The rest of the nation can learn an important lesson from the Lone Star State’s mistakes, and rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure and plan for contingencies.
The issue here isn’t really taxes, so much — the politicians would simply squander the money anyway instead of investing in desperately needed infrastructure, like the electrical grid or water mains. After all, Texas politics is staunchly Republican. If there is one thing the GOP stalwarts absolutely detest, it is making the world a better place by investing in the future. The problem is one of underlying philosophy. Texans take the concept of ‘limited government’ to the extreme. To Texans — or at least Republicans in Texas — the best government is no government at all. Someone once said that Texans want to see free-market capitalism subject to the rule of law — the law of the jungle.
(OK, I confess. I just made that last bit up.)
But as this piece from the Independent Media Institute points out [1], this will never happen as long as Republicans are in power. Republicans have absolutely no interest in rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure or planning for future emergencies to safeguard society from catastrophe. They believe that their well-being, and the well-being of their children, depends upon the accumulation of wealth — and they fully intend to accumulate all of the nation’s wealth and do so in the shortest possible time. The well-being of the rest of society is of no concern to them. Quite the contrary: desperate throngs of miserable ‘deplorables’ and a downtrodden labor force is seen as a strategic advantage by Republicans. Impoverished peasants do not pose any real threat to the established order. (Especially when you can use the power of the Orwellian surveillance state to keep them in line.)
Republicans have no fear of ever being part of this downtrodden labor force themselves. Republicans do not work. Republicans invest; they speculate; they exploit their fellow man through usury and financial manipulation. In short, Republicans live off the backs of others who they regard as chumps — honest working men and women. Republicans do not care that “man is everywhere in chains.” To Republicans, this is exactly as things should be in the neoliberal new world order: an upper class (them) lording it over the lower classes (which is all the rest of us.)
This catastrophe is a good example of just how neoliberal free-market capitalism works. (Or doesn’t.)
As Naked Capitalism’s Yves Smith points out, “Jamie Galbraith explains why this mess was a predictable result of unwarranted faith in free market ideology. Safety and redundancy are costs that profit-maximizers seek to avoid.”
Notes:
1. Republicans Offer Preview of Brutal Climate Policies in Texas, by Sonali Kolhatkar. Naked Capitalism (.com) February 20, 2021
Republicans Offer Preview of Brutal Climate Policies in Texas
(CHS 02-26-2021 1138 -0500)
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Cold Truth: The Texas Freeze is a Catastrophe of the Free Market
James K. Galbraith
Posted to Naked Capitalism (.com) on February 19, 2021 by Yves Smith
Yves here. The collateral damage of the Texas power grid power failures is getting worse and worse. Extensive burst pipes now mean that 14 million (no typo) are without potable water. From the Wall Street Journal:
More than 14 million people in Texas are without safe drinking water, as the fallout of a severe winter storm exacts a historic toll.
Cities including Austin, Houston and San Antonio are under boil-water notices until Monday. Some residents are bringing in shovelfuls of snow to flush their toilets.
The harsh weather has crippled Texas’s energy grid, leaving more than four millions residents without electricity during the peak of the blackouts, many of them remaining without heat in subfreezing conditions for days on end. The cold snap has also caused a wave of burst water pipes, which led to a loss of water pressure and a shortage….
Huge swaths of residents without clean water don’t have the electricity needed to boil it amid the continuing outages. Many others have pipes that are dry.
Kevin W linked to a Fox news report, Beleaguered Texas hospitals with no water evacuate patients amid winter storm power outages:
After a deadly blast of winter weather overwhelmed the electrical grid and left millions of Texans without power, hospitals in the state are also facing the additional stress of water shortages, crowded emergency rooms and even being forced to evacuate patients….
In Austin, hospitals dealt with a loss in water pressure and heat.
St. David’s South Austin Medical Center said Wednesday night that it had lost water pressure from the City of Austin. Since water feeds the facility’s boiler, the hospital was also losing heat.
Hospital officials were working to evacuate some patients to other area facilities and said they were distributing bottles and jugs of water to patients and employees. Officials added that they were working with the city to secure portable toilets…
In southwest Austin, officials with Ascension Seton Southwest Hospital said they too were facing intermittent issues with water pressure, the Austin American-Statesman reported. The hospital was rescheduling elective surgeries to preserve bed capacity and personnel as a result.
At Houston Methodist, two of its community hospitals did not have running water but still treated patients, with most non-emergency surgeries and procedures canceled for Thursday and possibly Friday, spokeswoman Gale Smith told the Associated Press.
Emergency rooms were crowded “due to patients being unable to meet their medical needs at home without electricity,” Smith said. She added that pipes had burst in Methodist’s hospitals but were being repaired as they happened….
FEMA sent generators to support water treatment plants, hospitals and nursing homes in Texas, along with thousands of blankets and ready-to-eat meals, officials said.
In an “urgent call to action,” the Texas Restaurant Association said hospitals in the state were “in serious need of food for their staff and patients” and said it was working to coordinate food donations.
Jamie Galbraith explains why this mess was a predictable result of unwarranted faith in free market ideology. Safety and redundancy are costs that profit-maximizers seek to avoid.
By James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government and Business Relations, University of Texas at Austin. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website
Lenin, who was a better economist than Rick Perry, once defined communism as “soviet power plus electrification of the whole country.” Competing with Stalin, the New Deal built dams and strung power lines in America’s backcountry. Lyndon Johnson, then a young congressman, got Roosevelt to help build the Mansfield Dam, which brought public power to the Texas hill country, and another, the Tom Miller dam, which brought it to the city of Austin.
Times changed. Texas grew and the cult of the free market took control of the state’s government. Economists lit the way forward. Electricity is the ultimate standard product, every jolt exactly like every other. Texas had a self-enclosed grid, cut off from interstate commerce and so is exempt from federal regulations. What better place to prove the virtues of a competitive, deregulated system?
Under New Deal-style regulations, electric utilities got a rate-of-return on their investment, governed by a utility commission that set and stabilized prices. It was (in principle) enough to cover construction and maintenance and a fair profit, not so much as to amount to monopoly profits; utilities were a stable but dull business, municipal socialism. Economists complained: there was an incentive, they said, for such utilities to over-invest. The bigger their operations, the higher their total costs, the more they could extract from the rate-setters.
What to do? Economists proposed a free market: let generating companies compete to deliver power to the consumer through the common electrical grid. Freely chosen contracts would govern the terms and the price. Competition would assure bare-bones, lean-and-mean efficiency, and low, low prices most of the time, reflecting the cost of fuel plus the smallest possible profit margin. The role of the state would be minimal – just to manage the common grid, through which power flows from the producer to the consumer. In times of shortage, prices might rise, but then the market would decide; those who did not wish to pay could always flip their switches off.
It was a perfect textbook setup, with supply on one side, demand on the other, and a neutral manager in between. True, there were a few loose ends. One is that demand for electricity is what economists call inelastic: it doesn’t respond much to price, but it does respond to changes in the weather, and at such times, of heat or cold, the demand becomes even more inelastic.
Another detail was that in an ordinary market, there can be some play in the relationship between supply and demand. If even a fishmonger does not sell his catch, he can, at the end of the day, cut his price – or even freeze the haddock for the following day. Electricity isn’t like that. Supply has to exactly equal demand every single minute of every single day. If it doesn’t, the entire system can fail.
This system, therefore, had three vulnerabilities. First, it created an incentive for cut-throat competition, to provide power in the cheapest possible way, which meant with machinery, wells, meters, pipes, and also windmills that were not insulated against extreme cold – a rarity but not unknown, even in Texas. Second, it left prices free to fluctuate. Third, it assured that when prices rose the most, that would be at exactly those moments when the demand for power was the greatest.
In 2002, under Governor Rick Perry, Texas deregulated its electricity system. After a few years, the electrical free market, managed by a non-profit called ERCOT, was fully-established. Some seventy or so providers eventually sprung up. While a few cities – including Austin – kept their public power, they were nevertheless tied to the state system.
The market system could, and did, work out most of the time. Prices rose and fell, and customers who didn’t sign long-term contracts faced some risk. One provider, called Griddy, had a special model: for $9.99 a month you could get your power at whatever the wholesale price was on any given day. That was cheap! Most of the time.
The problem with “most of the time” is that people need electric power all of the time. And Texas’s leaders knew as of 2011, at least, when the state went through a short, severe freeze, that the system was radically unstable in extreme weather. But they did nothing. To do something, they would have had to regulate the system. And they didn’t want to regulate the system, because the providers, a rich source of campaign funding, didn’t want to be regulated and to have to spend on weatherization that was not needed – most of the time. In 2020, even voluntary inspections were suspended, due to Covid-19.
Enter the deep freeze of 2021. Demand went up. Supply went down. Natural gas froze up at the wells, in the pipes, and at the generating plants. Unweatherized windmills also went off-line, a small part of the story. Since Texas is disconnected from the rest of the country, no reserves could be imported, and given the cold everywhere, there would have been none available anyway. There came a point, on Sunday, February 14 or the next day, when demand so outstripped supply that the entire Texas grid came within minutes of a collapse that, we are told, would have taken months to repair.
As this happened, the price mechanism failed completely. Wholesale prices rose a hundred-fold – but retail prices, under contract, did not, except for the unlucky customers of Griddy, who got socked with bills for thousands of dollars each day. ERCOT was therefore forced to cut power, which might have been tolerable, had it happened on a rolling basis across neighborhoods throughout the state. But this was impossible: you can’t cut power to hospitals, fire stations, and other critical facilities, or for that matter to high-rise downtown apartments reliant on elevators. So lights stayed on in some areas, and they stayed off – for days on end – in others. Selective socialism, one might call it.
When the lights go off and the heat goes down, water freezes and that was the next phase of the calamity. For when water freezes, pipes burst, and when pipes burst the water supply cannot keep up with the demand. So across Texas, water pressure is falling, as I type these words. Hospitals without water cannot generate steam, and therefore heat; and some of them are being evacuated right now. Meanwhile, ice is bearing down on the power lines.
For most of us, it’s a waiting game. We know the power will come back soon, just as it is no longer so desperately needed. We don’t know how long before water supplies are fully restored. Food is a matter of how well-prepared you were beforehand. Anyone without ready cash, anyone who relied on official information, anyone who just didn’t get out before the storm – all those anyones have a problem.
Rick Perry has reassured us that as Texans we’re prepared to sacrifice ourselves to avoid the curse of socialism. But it’s too late now. In the aftermath of this debacle, we will return to New Deal-style municipal socialism, or this disaster of power, water, and gas will happen again. Socialism is government, in technical matters, by engineers and others who know their stuff and not by ideologues who do not. Compared to Texas right now, it’s not such a bad prospect. In the USSR, despite all its other flaws and the Russian cold, the power and the heat did stay on. Even in the worst of the post-Soviet free-market collapse the Moscow metro, a triumph of municipal socialism, never stopped.
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URL of article on Naked Caliptalism:
Cold Truth: The Texas Freeze is a Catastrophe of the Free Market
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TITL: Cold Truth: The Texas Freeze is a Catastrophe of the Free Market
AUTH: JAMES K. GALBRAITH
ORIG: Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website
SUBJ: [ENERGY]
SUBJ: [US POLITICS] [PARADIGMS] [SOCIALISM]
SUBJ: [ECONOMICS] [FREE MARKET ECONOMICS (FAILURE OF ….)]
SUBJ: [2ND AMERICAN REVOLUTION] [PRINCIPLES]
SUBJ: [NATIONAL SECURITY] [EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS] (ELECTRICAL GRID VULNERABILITIES)
TYPE: TEXT FILE (FROM WEB SITE HTML)
PUBL: NAKED CAPITALISM (.COM)
DATE: FEBRUARY 19, 2021
UPDT: 02-22-2021 1006 -0500
DBFN: COLD TRUTH – THE TEXAS FREEZE IS A CATASTROPHE OF THE FREE MARKET (INET)(NC)(J. K. GALBRAITH).TXT
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