California, New York are least free states....

[The Annoyed Man]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... study.html

I'm posting this from my iPad, and unfortunately the Daily Mail website isn't allowing me to copy and past any of the text of the article. Anyway, the study was compiled by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

New Hampshire, North Dakota, and Indiana were ranked as the "most free." I'm not sure if I agree with with all the study's conclusions because I haven't read it in depth, but one of the parameters that was interesting was that a state was deemed more free if it promoted gun rights. (HERE IS A FAQ ABOUT NH GUN LAWS)

Anyway, interesting maps and charts are included. Surprisingly, Texas does not rank nearly as high as the top three.

[chasfm11]

It would be interesting to see which of quadrants on the pie chart pushed Texas standing down.

Some of it might be interpretation. For example, Texas has ERCOT to regulate the electric power industry. It was supposed to promote competition but has had the opposite effect so far. I noticed that the eminent domain percentage is 2.68% (as compared to the gun control of 6.67%.) There are have a number Texas cases where eminent domain was used to further political ideology and commercial use rather that for public use like roads and schools.

Without understand the specific criteria in each of the categories shown, it is difficult to understand the outcome. The study seems a little like some of the Consumer Reports reviews on products. It generally comes out like most of us would have expected but with some unexplainable twists.

[raptor]

Texas has ERCOT to regulate the electric power industry. It was supposed to promote competition but has had the opposite effect so far.

You aint just whistling Dixie!

[VMI77]

Some of it might be interpretation. For example, Texas has ERCOT to regulate the electric power industry. It was supposed to promote competition but has had the opposite effect so far. I noticed that the eminent domain percentage is 2.68% (as compared to the gun control of 6.67%.) There are have a number Texas cases where eminent domain was used to further political ideology and commercial use rather that for public use like roads and schools.

Actually, ERCOT was originally just a group to coordinate reliability operations between the many different power companies, coops, and municipalities in the state, and had no role whatsoever in promoting "competition." For perspective, before "deregulation" ERCOT had a handful of employees, a budget less than $5 million a year, and no debt. By 2009, ERCOT had over 700 employees (about 660 I think now, having dismissed some employees after starting the nodal system), operating expenses of about $140 million, and almost $370 million of debt.

There is no "competition," nor was it ever intended there be any real competition. "Competition" was the buzz word to sell the scam, which from the start was a deliberate creation of a fake "market" for use as a tool to extract maximum revenue from consumers. "Congestion" is one of the tools used for this purpose and it is a manufactured pretense to transfer hundreds of millions of dollars to speculators like Morgan Stanley, Duetche Banke, and Goldman Sachs. The fact is, before "deregulation" electricity prices in Texas were lower than the national average. Now, inside the ERCOT region, which has "competition," the prices are higher than the national average, while in those areas inside the state not within the ERCOT region, electricity prices are still lower than the national average. It's ironic that the lowest prices inside ERCOT all come from the "non competitive" producers who didn't "opt-in" to competition, basically coops and municipalities. Funny how government operated municipal providers like the City of Austin are able to sell cheaper electricity than the "competitive" providers.

The fundamental economic basis for the "competition" scam is the demand inelasticity of electricity consumption. The system was designed to exploit the fact that rates can increase significantly with very little effect on consumption. Every element of the system design exploits this concept in order to extract maximum revenue from consumers.

Prior to "competition" the cost of "congestion" was essentially the return on capital for regulated assets. If a line actually reached or exceeded a limit, nearby generation would be increased or decreased to prevent the line from overloading --in real time. Now, "congestion" is purely imaginary. Huge payments are made based on a calculation that IF such and such a line were out-of-service, such and such a line would overload, and money is paid out to generators and speculators even though these outages don't occur. These "congestion" calculations are made for EVERY transmission line in the entire ERCOT system. These payments can amount to several thousand dollars per MWhr. For perspective, this imaginary congestion was going to result in an estimated $300 million in "congestion" costs being assigned this year to consumers in the Rio Grande Valley, so a political decision was made to lower the $3,000 per MWhr price cap to $350 per MWhr for the Valley --which is expected to result in only $60 million in "congestion" charges.

If interested read this document (http://www.infrastructureusa.org/wp-con ... -ercot.pdf) --it's a 3.5 MB PDF file called "The Story of ERCOT." It's the best and most accurate description I've read of what's really going on with the electric system in Texas.


Edited to update current number of ERCOT employees.