The Sierra Club used the "to cheap to meter" argument to successfully stop the damming of the Grand Canyon.
Eugene Coyle wrote:
Cato Institute, the rigid libertarian tank (can't write think tank) has reversed its long held advocacy of electric deregulation.
The Cato Institute, a leading anti-government, free market advocacy group, released a report yesterday http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=2609
"We recommend total abandonment of restructuring and a more thoroughgoing embrace of markets than contemplated in current restructuring initiatives. But we recognize that such reforms are politically difficult to achieve. A second-best alternative would be for those states that have already embraced restructuring to return to an updated version of the old, vertically integrated, regulated status quo."
This is really man bites dog stuff.
The analysis is flawed -- but still something folks might want to use.
One amusing thing in it -- in relying (as many economists advocating deregulation do) on a shallow understanding of incentives, the authors note that nuclear is capital intensive. And then they blame "progressives" for the 1960s claim of "too cheap to meter." These are the same progressives, no doubt, who controlled GE and Westinghouse and the Eisenhower adminstration and who control, of course, our universities and the media.
This CATO thing almost could have been written by the Yesmen who did a number on Dow, but it isn't a hoax.
Gene Coyle
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Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
