David Rhodes wrote:
In general - as I mentioned to you last week - my view
of humanity seems to differ from yours, which may be
the philosophical root here - i.e. I believe 95% of
people want to live their lives without hurting other
people.
This article provides evidence for David's view of humanity:
Notes From the Blackout
by Gene Callahan
published August 18, 2003
Having just moved to Brooklyn, I was center
stage for the "Blackout of '03." The most
salient feature of the event here was how calm
New York City was. People were wandering the
streets of my neighborhood well after dark (and
no, not in order to mug other people).
Spontaneous street parties arose in a number of
places. Everyone was talking to everyone else.
Strangers would gather around someone on her
stoop with a transistor radio or sitting in his
car listening to the news. In Brooklyn, even
traffic flowed smoothly. At busy intersections
cars pulled to a stop on their own. One driver
would wave the other through. People stopped
for pedestrians at crosswalks without a traffic
light or the threat of a ticket to make them do
so. I heard of two minor incidents of looting,
both in the worst neighborhood in the borough.
One person in the city died as a result of the
blackout... from a heart attack.
An exception to the generally civil behavior
was the police. The morning of the blackout
(OK, so it wasn't during the blackout, I admit,
but the story is good so I put it in) a cop
pulled in the wrong way onto our one-way
street, parked in front of a fire hydrant, and
ran into the deli. He came back out with a cup
of coffee. My wife expected to see him back out
onto the main road, but no, he just continued
down the street the wrong way to the next
intersection. Hey, a man's gotta have his cuppa
joe, don't he?
The evening of the blackout, a local Italian
restaurant was doing booming business selling
pizza: their oven was gas-powered and therefore
operational. A large crowd had gathered and
there was no parking in the immediate area. Two
off-duty cops left the police station just down
the street and drove up to the corner where the
restaurant is. They double-parked their SUV,
with its rear end blocking the crosswalk. The
passenger got out and ran into the restaurant.
For the entire ten to fifteen minutes it took
to get their food, the driver sat in the car
(he did put his hazards on), forcing other cars
and pedestrians to detour around him. You don't
expect New York's finest to park legally and
walk a friggin' block, do you?
Civil society, given a chance, works far better
on its own than statists can conceive. The
government sits atop it like a parasite, and is
most often a major threat to its smooth
functioning.
The Cause of the Blackout Swiftly Identified
Somewhat predictably, The New York Times was
immediately able to pin the blame for the
blackout where it belonged: on the free market.
An editorial on Saturday by Robert Kuttner
claimed that "deregulation" was the cause of
the event.
There are, of course, several problems with his
thesis. The first is that no electricity
deregulation has actually occurred. The
government, rather than simply ceasing to
interfere in the market for electricity,
instead substituted one set of complex
regulations for another. Whatever the right
word for this is ("re-regulation"?), it's not
deregulation. That's just a trendy term the
proponents of the new regulations employed to
market them.
Kuttner contends that the "discipline of free
markets" can't be expected to work for
electricity, because it can't be stored in
large quantities. Kuttner has apparently failed
to notice that sushi, haircuts, concert
performances, airline seats, and countless
other goods cannot be stored long or at all,
and yet markets for them work just fine.
He also holds that the "fairly fixed demand"
for electricity makes the market for it
different than other markets. Startlingly, when
Kuttner says this he doesn't seem to notice
that he explained why the demand is relatively
constant in his previous paragraph: consumer
prices are still regulated! Of course, if
electricity prices don't rise to reflect a
shortage, then demand will remain where it was.
What could be more obvious than that this
"fairly fixed demand" is a "fairly predictable
result" of the very sort of regulation for
which Kuttner longs?!
Finally, an unkind critic might ask of Kuttner:
what about the blackouts of 1959, 1961, 1965
and 1977? If Kuttner can tell, one day after
the event, that deregulation caused the 2003
blackout, can we also conclude that regulation
caused the previous ones?
To be fair, Kuttner is partially correct in
blaming the blackout on economic theory:
"deregulation," as it is practiced today, is a
conceit of economists who think they can use
mathematical models to construct something
that, while not a free market, is so much like
one that no one will be able to tell the
difference.
But, like margarine, these schemes always leave
a funny aftertaste that real butter doesn't
have.
The Non-Cause of the Blackout Swiftly
Identified
While on the subject of the blackout's cause, I
wonder if anyone else was puzzled by Bush's
statement, only a few hours after the outage
began, that, while no one had any idea what had
caused it, he knew without a doubt that it
hadn't been terrorists. How could he be so
sure, if he didn't know yet what had happened?
Granted, by that point he was probably fairly
certain that no terrorist had bombed a power
plant or flown a plane into one. But perhaps
they thought of something else, of which most
people hadn't conceived, that would cause a
blackout. After all, our government itself
asserted that no one could have foreseen
terrorists using box cutters to hijack planes
and turn them into missiles. But the terrorists
thought of it. How does Bush know, without
knowing the cause of the event, that there
isn't some new tactic that "no one" has
foreseen?
I certainly have no inkling that it was
terrorists. Most likely it was simply a big
screw-up. But Bush's statement demonstrates the
frantic PR concerns of the administration. I
think we can count on it "definitively ruling
out" terrorism as the cause of any disaster
that was not unambiguously perpetrated by
terrorists.
Gene Callahan [send him mail], the author of
Economics for Real People, is an adjunct
scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a
contributing columnist to LewRockwell.com.
Copyright (c) 2003 Gene Callahan
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