The State Journal’s feature on Wisconsin’s annual summer energy crisis offered many excuses for this ridicuously predictable conundrum. But the real reason is so clear, even a dumb shmoe like me can put the pieces together.
 Consider: Power companies make their money selling electricity. When they run thousands of ads pleading with people to buy less electricity, something strange is going on. Some disasters are unavoidable. When a man-made disaster occurs each year without fail, you have to start asking yourself some questions.

 Why doesn’t Mobil have “gas conservation” ads on Memorial Day weekend? Why will we have no food shortage despite terrible crop failures in the eastern U.S.? How is our amazingly complex country able to function largely free of both shortages and surpluses? 

The answer is pricing freedom, a freedom missing from the power industry. When producers can charge whatever they please, and consumers can pay whatever they please, everyone wins and phenomenal progress results. This laissez-faire system is the only moral way for humans to associate with each other, as we libertarians have said for years. What’s more, it works!

When folks drive too much for the gas pipelines to handle, prices simply go up and there is no problem. Eventually some “capitalist pig” builds more pipe and we thank him with our dollars. As some readers may recall, Nixon demonstrated the alternative when he decided he knew the “fair” price for gas and made us all suffer the consequences. 

Right now, we are suffering the consequences of electric price controls. Brownouts, business shutdowns, and dangerous power crunches waste millions and court complete disaster as systems are overloaded. The problem is not too few powerplants--that is just a symptom. The problem is that the Public Service Commision is the one solving the problem. No offense to the many good folks at PSC, but a government-protected and regulated monopoly won’t work any better for us than for the Soviets. It causes very strange things to happen. For instance, during the July shortage, we all still paid 6¢ per Kwh, as required by the PSC. Meanwhile, the actual market price of electricity rose hundreds of times higher than normal. At one point, it was selling for about $5.47 per Kwh, meaning that you could theoretically earn over $20 an hour riding an exercise bike with a generator. This nonsensical situation was caused by the regulators’ price ceiling. If the power companies could have raised prices, demand would have dropped, and prices would not have skyrocketed in the crunch.

Price controls have a long, rich history of utter, abject failure. They have failed so convincingly, it is time for us as a sane people to stop clinging to them and open our electrical systems to the free market. With unshackled human ingenuity running loose, all problems are solvable. 



John Wiltbank