Craig <cchayniepub...@gmail.com> wrote: Only a free market can assess all the risks and costs, and provide the best > product at the cheapest price. >
I am all in favor of capitalism, but it does not always assess all risks and costs successfully. Like any institution, it fails. People are imperfect and our institutions likewise. That is why coal goes on killing tens of thousands of people. That is why automobiles were unsafe until the Federal Government began regulating them in the 1960s. > If the coal industry is killing people, there should be a court which > would allow compensation. > But there isn't, and there never will be. The coal interests are too powerful to allow any such court. They will squash it with political power. They own several Representatives in Congress, the entire state of West Virginia, and people such as Romney. Political power often trumps economic theory. There is no point in discussing what "should be." We will stop using coal eventually because it will be obsolete. That will happen before any such court is established. There will be no justice for the poor people killed of by this technology. They have no money and they do not vote, so they are invisible to the economy and to Washington. > Once all costs are considered . . . > They never will be. The power companies and rate payers will not spend an extra penny per kilowatt hour to save 20,000 poor people. Or 200,000 if it came to that. They have been killing people at that rate for a century. Why should they stop? Who will make them? If anyone does make them stop, it will be a political movement, not an economic one. It will owe nothing to capitalism. - Jed
