The laissez-faire capitalism chronicles: The Texas grid breaks down again

A person has just got to acknowledge the unfailing persistence of laissez-faire capitalists and how they govern. Those buggers never lose sight one the one and only relevant moral value, profit. It doesn't matter how many people die or how how many millions of tons of pollution their profit pursuit spews into the environment. Profit is king, and everything else is a bunch of expendable pawns. NBC News writes:

Texas power grid operator asks customers to conserve 

electricity after six plants go offline

The operator of Texas' power grid asked residents to conserve electricity Friday after six power plants went offline amid soaring temperatures.

Brad Jones, CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said in a statement that the company had lost roughly 2,900 megawatts of electricity — or enough to power nearly 600,000 homes, the Texas Tribune reported.

[In keeping with the always popular KYMS propaganda tactic] Jones did not say why the plants went offline, and a spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment Friday evening.

[KYMS: Keep your mouth shut]

The non-profit energy organization, which manages power for 90 percent of Texas' electrical grid, faced blistering criticism last year after blackouts left millions without power for days during subfreezing temperatures.

The company blamed frozen equipment in an event that left more than 200 people dead, many from carbon monoxide poisoning as they tried to stay warm. Others froze to death.

The company's CEO was fired and six board members — including the chairwoman and chairman — resigned. [Nobody went to jail and the executives probably got huge bonuses on their way out the door]

State lawmakers responded with a [hopelessly leaky] raft of legislation aimed at making the grid more resilient to a brutal winter storm.

Nearly a year later, an investigation by NBC News and the Texas Tribune found that the grid remained vulnerable, with new regulations allowing companies to avoid the improvements. [In making a mistake by abandoning from the KYMS tactic and making a mistake,] Jones referenced the unseasonably hot weather, saying it was driving the demand for power across the state. Temperatures approaching 100 degrees were forecast from Austin to Dallas over the weekend and into next week.

By referring to “unseasonably hot weather,” Jones ignores the fact that Texas has hot weather much of the year and there are weather forecasts that predict when it will get hot. One of two possibilities are plausible. Either unseasonably hot weather had nothing to do with the current grid failure, or forecasts of unseasonably hot weather were ignored. Either way, a combination of corruption and incompetence explains the situation.

Also note that the “raft of legislation” was passed by Texas legislators. Most of them are laissez-faire capitalist ideologues. Those ideologues believe that only markets running free, wild, butt naked and drunk as a skunk can solve problems. They live by one and only one moral value, profit. Everything else is secondary, including human life and the environment. 

Without a social conscience[1], the problems that laissez-faire capitalism is seriously concerned about are ones that impair unfettered accumulation, privatization and trickling up of profits while socializing risk and harm, including mass human deaths, vast environmental damage, and subversion and corruption of democracy, government and society. 

Footnote: 

1. Prominent economist Milton Friedman published an essay in 1970, The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits. He argued that the best type of CEO was not one with a social conscience. CEOs with a social conscience were considered to be “highly subversive to the capitalist system.” Newsweek wrote this in 2017:

In 1970, Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman published an essay in The New York Times Magazine titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Flouting the midcentury view (and that of the most influential faculty at the Harvard Business School) that the best type of CEO was one with an enlightened social conscience, Friedman claimed that such executives were “highly subversive to the capitalist system.” His tone was snide. "[Businessmen] believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned ‘merely’ with profit but also with promoting desirable 'social' ends, that business has a ‘social conscience’ and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are—or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously—preaching pure and unadulterated socialism."

Notice the lie in the highlighted last sentence. Capitalism can be regulated into having a social conscience without conversion of government and society to socialism with appropriation by government of the means of production. Friedman’s assertion is a bald faced lie. It is insulting, ruthless capitalist propaganda from an arrogant, ruthless liar.