Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Via Instapundit comes a disturbing report that one-fifth of the British electorate would consider voting for the British Nationalist Party (BNP), which is considered by almost everyone left or right to be a genuine fascist party.
How did Britain come to this state?
Recently I wrote about Britain and electricity and the fact that Britain isn’t bringing new capacity on line in time to stave off a looming crisis as older plants go out of service and electricity demand rises.
This article, titled “Questioning the invisible hand“, has the sub title “Can liberalized energy markets cut carbon emissions? Britain is starting to doubt it”.
The first myth is that Britain, like America, really “deregulated” or “liberalized” their markets. A better description would be that the markets are “regulated differently”.
In the old markets, utilities had a duty to plan for customer demand growth and re-invest in future capacity. Many of the deregulation schemes split off generation, transmission, and local energy distribution into separate companies, which is fine in theory because then each of these three components could be optimized. In many cases local citizens were given a “choice” of electricity providers at the distribution level, but these distribution companies still essentially utilized “legacy” transmission and generation assets.
The reason that these schemes were only partially deregulated is that 1) barriers in the market place ensured that it was difficult to build base load capacity of coal or nuclear power, meaning that the older units ruled the market 2) the spot price of generation was determined by gas fired units, which essentially meant that it fluctuated with the price of natural gas 3) building transmission is so onerous (getting permits, siting it) and funding is so uncertain that the grid was not significantly improved. What did happen is that price controls on generation were lifted and rates were capped, so for a decade or so there weren’t increases in the price of electricity from the generation side.
From the article:
The committee’s diagnosis was stark: the market, left to its own devices, is failing to deliver (carbon reductions). Consumers are not buying energy-efficient appliances or insulating their houses… and power makers still prefer fossil fuels to greener alternatives.
Here’s George Orwell, writing in 1940 about England and the English:
When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European crowd. Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such things as nations? Are we not forty-six million individuals, all different? And the diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pintables in the Soho pubs, the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning – all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene. How can one make a pattern out of this muddle?
But talk to foreigners, read foreign books or newspapers, and you are brought back to the same thought. Yes, there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillarboxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches in to the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantlepiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.
And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time. The suet puddings and the red pillarboxes have entered into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side of the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.
George Orwell was a socialist. He wanted to see radical transformation in his society. But in the above passage, he displays real affection for the English people and their culture.
Can anyone imagine Barack Obama writing something parallel to the above about America and the American people? To ask the question is to answer it. Clearly, Obama does not identify with America in the same sort of way that Orwell identified with England.
Why, then, did Obama wish to become our President?
Two analogies come to mind…
Two British policewomen are in trouble because they watch each other’s kids on a regular basis. The charge is “operating an illegal childminding business.”
Lest you think that this is only a British form of insantiy and such things could never happen in the United States…
A good speech. The Germans were given every possible chance, and chose war. Chamberlain did not, like us, live in the shadow of “Munich”. He lived in the shadow of July-August 1914, where the major powers of Europe failed to talk, failed to bargain, failed to try to make reasonable accomodations to each other’s demands, and World War I with its millions of deaths resulted. That is what Chamberlain tried to avoid. But, when it proved to be impossible, he led Britain into war, and he did so with a country united because it knew every other possible avenue had been explored. Churchill was right to be charitable to Chamberlain, even as he was right to say Chamberlain should have drawn the line earlier. But few in Britain agreed with Churchill at the time. They did not want to fight the Battle of the Somme again. As it turned out, they had no choice. They were not interested in war, but as the saying goes, it was interested in them.
Hat tip Conservative History.