February 17, 2021 ☼ gop ☼ libertarians ☼ texas ☼ climate ☼ power-failure
Source: The Washington Post - Link
“No one owes you [or] your family anything,” Tim Boyd wrote on Tuesday in a now-deleted Facebook post, according to KTXS and KTAB/KRBC. “I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout!”
Spoken like a true libertarian. Unfortunately, the populace disagreed with him and, appropriately, he is now persona-non-grata.
The controversy highlighted how one of the worst winter storms in decades is testing the limits of the embrace of self-sufficiency and rugged individualism in Texas. The state’s decision to skirt federal oversight by operating its own power grid is one of the main reasons that close to 3.3 million residents in Texas still lacked electricity by early Wednesday morning, while outages in other hard-hit states had dwindled to less than one-tenth of that size. As of late Tuesday, grid operators still couldn’t predict when the lights might turn on, and advocates were warning that Texas’s poorest and most vulnerable residents were at risk of freezing to death. At least 10 deaths in Texas have been linked to the winter storm since Monday, according to the Houston Chronicle.
This is what happens when the regulators are the owners. There is no incentive to provide reliable service over cheap service. The same is true of health insurance, it works until something unexpected happens.