Texas power crisis revealed flaw in market’s design

Our industry developed due to the labour put in by so many and central planning and funding by several governments, not due to free markets.

It's a literal idealist position to insist that free markets cause development, when the vast majority of material evidence across the world points to the contrary.

If there is sufficient competition, anyone holding out for extreme prices will make less money than anyone that kicks in at moderate prices, and will usually make no money at all. Same for refusing to invest in more plants when they would easily be profitable.

Compare the gasoline market in the US. It's sufficiently competitive, so there is no way for gas stations to start refusing offers under $50 a gallon and wait for people to get desperate.

But that doesn't mean there will be enough plants, even if there is sufficient competition, it would just push out manipulators.

Depends on your definition of "free market". If you mean libre non-profit exchange between consenting peers, i'm all for free market. If you mean a profit-based economy where the people who "own" everything dictate life conditions for the rest of us, i'm pretty much against it.

> Is it to much to ask that the opinions are supported by evidence?

Economy is not a field i'm familiar with so i can't unfortunately provide evidence, but it always appeared to me that with some notable exceptions, regulations protecting consumers from corporations had great effects: lower prices, better quality, better customer service...

Half the articles i read about the USA seem to be about medication prices rising twofold every few years despite being well-studied/produced for decades (like insulin), or ISPs injecting their own advertisement or blocking services from competitors or making lawsuits against municipal ISPs, or people raising debt just for having a lawyer or receiving an education, etc.

There's a lot i hate about France (where i reside), but i'm certainly glad we have "medicare for all" through a national insurance (sécurité sociale), net-neutrality regulations, and free legal defense and education. Although as some would point out, the french governments of the past 30 years or so have been hard at work to dismantle all that.

Competition does not advance humanity. Cooperation is what brought humanity so far (see also: Kropotkin, Graeber, etc). Competition does not reduce costs, except occasionally when a mogul wants to capture the market (like free.fr did when they offered 30€/mo unmetered xDSL back in the early 2000's, which they don't do anymore now that they've become big enough to assert their position).

Don't get me wrong, i'm not advertising for State monopoly. On the contrary, i laud autonomous projects and infrastructure and i'm very critical that in France it's illegal to even build your own house for private usage (unless you follow very strict regulations) or to produce your own electricity (unless you sell it back to EDF). I just don't think that what most people refer to as a deregulated "free market" (based on money and private property) has better outcomes except for the 1% who own everything.

Famous anecdote in french FLOSS circles: when the telecoms regulator (ARCEP) began the process to "open competition" for the ISP market, there were hundreds of ISPs across France and the dozens of representatives couldn't fit in a room at ARCEP offices. A few years later than that, there were only 5-10 represented operators left. Now you can count them on one hand, and the ARCEP people seem happy/relieved about that, as if they'd done their job implementing "competition" by reducing the number of competitors.

Why do once-in-a-century weather events seem to happen so much more than once in a century?

Texas has huge and growing wind and solar resources. The entire west half of the state is windy desert. At one point you couldn't drive across I-40 without passing a 100-meter turbine blade convoy every few minutes. It's true that they can't supply the needs of the entire state yet, but wind power is hugely effective in the winter—provided you budget for cold-weather reliability.

It's very possible that in a competently run system, where both renewables and fossil fuels were properly hardened, wind would have meant the difference between blackouts and getting by.