Responding to the heat wave in LA, Prof. Bainbridge writes:
Still, I’m feeling less libertarian about [global warming] every day the temperature stays above 90.
Funny how that works. It’s like I’ve said before — if a neocon is a liberal who got mugged, a progressive is a conservative who got sick.
Libertarians are curiously discomfited when anything threatens their little bubble, aren’t they. When the brandy and cigars get scarce, their faith weakens.
The comments are a weird back and forth about California’s rolling blackouts of 2001 and today: the underlying question that no one had asked last I looked was whether some things were really best left to market forces. Electricity in some places is needed to preserve human life (in hospitals, for example) and to enable industry and the other stuff we claim to all about. Do we really want the likes of Enron’s traders manipulating the flow of power for their own gain, to preserve the illusion of transparently benevolent market forces?
Of course, I can already hear the argument that public control of one essential piece of infrastructure (of those that can be run at a profit, not something like the interstate highway system) is socialism or worse, communism. To which I am inclined to reply, “so?” But to keep the discourse at a somewhat elevated level, does it all have to be one way or the other? I don’t argue for government control of the auto industry or steel: these are, to some degree, goods that people can opt out of using. But opting out of using water or electricity is more difficult and for some impossible.