• Corpus ID: 155626191

The origins of political electricity: Market failure or political opportunism?

@article{Bradley1996TheOO,
  title={The origins of political electricity: Market failure or political opportunism?},
  author={Robert L. Bradley},
  journal={The Energy Law Journal},
  year={1996},
  volume={17}
}

• R. Bradley
• Published 31 December 1996
• Economics
• The Energy Law Journal

The current debate over restructuring the electric industry, which includes such issues as displacing the regulatory covenant, repealing the Public Utility Holding Company Act, and privatizing municipal power systems, the Rural Utilities Service (formerly Rural Electrification Administration), and federally owned power systems, makes a look back at the origins of political electricity relevant. The thesis of this essay, that government intervention into electric markets was not the result of market failures but, rather, represented business and political opportunism, suggests that the intellectual and empirical case for market-oriented reform is even stronger than would otherwise be the case. A major theme of applied political economy is the dynamics of government intervention in the marketplace. Because interventions are often related, an analytical distinction can be made between basis point and cumulative intervention. Basis point regulation, taxation, or subsidizaion is the opening government intervention into a market setting; cumulative intervention is further regulation, taxation, or subsidization that is attributable to the effects of prior (basis point or cumulative) intervention. The origins and maturation of political electricity, as will be seen, are interpretable through this theoretical framework.