Democide in Texas

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“Democide is any actions by government that cause death by virtue of an intentionally or knowingly reckless and depraved disregard for life” – R J Rummel

 

“The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make; not real new things of its own.” – JRR Tolkien

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Despite all Republican and libertarian ideals of freedom, despite all the talk of strength, literal millions in Texas are without power and heat in the bitterest winter in years. There have so far been 13 deaths reported as a result; likely there are more and will be more in the days to come.

How did this happen? Texas is a rich state, an energy producer. It should have no problem maintaining power to its citizens through a cold snap. While global climate change may have contributed to this bitter winter in Texas, it has happened before climate change was so advanced, in 1979 and 2011. Hard winters hit Texas every so often, perhaps every decade or so.

Ed Hirs, an energy economist at the University of Texas, wrote in 2013: “ERCOT's computer program cannot show future market clearing costs equal to prices sufficient to entice generation and transmission companies to make capital investments to meet future demand growth.” Hirs is not any sort of leftist. In his 2013 article, he compared the Texas energy economy to the Soviet planned economy and advocates for deregulation, which would instead bankrupt many people in a bad winter, but his modeling is correct. The Texas energy system, carefully disconnected from the two grids that cover the rest of the USA so as to avoid Federal regulation, cannot cope with extreme events and cannot afford to build extra capacity. This is Yet Another Failure of the brittle libertarian model of capitalism. As I wrote in 2020, “there were all these arguments made that, despite a lack of law and regulation, despite the whole thing working like a bucket of fiddler crabs, each one striving to climb to the top of the heap over the bodies of all the others, the goal of making a profit would result in a emergent stable and productive economic order with unprecedented personal liberties for all” but “just as grades in a grading system where the stakes are high and there is no discipline, self or imposed, go to the cheaters, profit went to those who cheated. Instead of a stable, productive economic order we got one in which the majority of actors did the minimum work for the maximum profit, and quality and safety be damned.”

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These people, the fascist Republican leadership, these advocates of “freedom,” they have no ideas of their own. They can only break and mock, not create. When they get into power, that is what they do. They are in this more akin to religious extremists than the robber baron capitalists they so admire. The old robber baron capitalists were cruel and greedy. But they built and what they built has lasted. The ultimate end of fascism is always death. Slow or fast, but always death. They do not build, only destroy. They are empty inside and seek to spread that emptiness to the whole world.