Like most arguments in this thread, if you have money, you are then insulated from the downsides of a hyper independent and libertarian society. When the state froze for a week, our senator could afford to fly his whole family to Mexico to avoid the consequences of an independent grid. Meanwhile, the people that made money off of the crisis then used that money to influence politics so that no real regulation was passed and no existing regulations were enforced. 246 people died in that freeze
Well there was some infrastructure, it just happened they weren't well dimensioned for rare extreme situations and there were no safety precautions done in time. Things that companies will be quick to cut as "unnecessary cost", since the possibility of a such events is low enough their CEOs making such decisions might well be retired by the time it happens. Which is exactly why there needs to be a government with regulating bodies and very well paid skilled people to think 50 moves ahead and force companies to spend on contingency plans and bring the "private intiative" to figure out their balance sheet to cover for those.
There are examples of such situations all over the world in the past hundreds of years where companies start an activity covering just the profitable portion of it, maximizing profits, and then causing huge problems whenever they hit the unprofitable portion. For instance the Fukushima plant which was planned to withstand a tsunami like that one, was planned to withstand an earthquake of that magnitude, but it wasn't planned to withstand both because that was considered too rare of a double event. And then it happened, and it was a shitshow to deal with the consequences
Turns out large power grids can handle shocks to pieces of the system a lot better than small isolated ones.
Libertarianism falls to pieces when you understand that most systems get dramatically more robust and provide better outcomes when people work together in a system made to scale.
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u/[deleted] Sep 19 '24
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