Complexity has been added to complexity in the unfolding PURA mess. And we all know, do we not, that political fraud of every kind nests comfortably in complexity, awaiting a resolution that resolves little?
PURA is Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority.
Until the elevation of Marissa Gillett to the commission’s top position, PURA
was, according to statute forming it, a (six) member commission whose mission
was the regulation of public utilities.
The commission was from its inception imperfectly formed.
There are presently three members serving on the PURA board. Gillett, Governor
Ned Lamont’s handpicked chairman is, most political watchers will agree, a
disturber of the peace, but she has the unqualified support of Lamont and
gatekeepers in the Democrat dominated General Assembly, chief among them Senate
President Pro Tempore Martin Looney of New Haven and Senate Majority Leader Bob
Duff of Norwalk. When these three work in concert, alternative voices are
silenced and numbers rule.
Most recently, State Senate Republicans decided to walk out
of the General Assembly in protest rather than participate in a vote
renominating Gillett to her position as head autocrat of PURA.
For months, largely owing to a drift towards political autocracy,
newspapers have warned us that a crunch was coming. Under Gillette, PURA,
reformed and reinvigorated, no longer resembles our daddy’s PURA. Daddy’s PURA
exercised control over energy prices through gentle persuasion by means of
advisory measures. Gillett exercises control over energy prices by dictating
prices through regulatory mandates. She rules with a bat rather than a soft
voice. Her guiding principle may be put in the form of a question: What is the
point, after all, of establishing a Public Utilities Regulatory (emphasis
mine) Authority that eschews price regulation?
Naturally, energy distributors in Connecticut, as well as
all other businesses in the state, resist price controls or any lethal attempt
to repeal through dictates the immutable laws of a free market economy. Price
controls didn’t work for Tricky Dick Nixon, and they will
not work for Gillett – unless Gillett and her supporters are able to repeal the
economic laws governing a free market system or, better still, unless the
governing authority is able to abolish free markets altogether. The father of
fascism, Benito Mussolini, described the process of replacing free markets with
a central authority when he was asked to define fascism: “Everything in the
state,” Mussolini obliged, “nothing outside the state, nothing above the
state.”
One can only speculate how Lamont, presumably pro-business,
permitted himself the socialist luxury of setting prices for businesses. Bad
advice makes for bad politics and bad business. Energy consumers in Connecticut
can only hope that a just court decision will rescue them – and Lamont, and
Gillett --from the predictable consequences of ruinous policy decisions.
Compliance with statutory directives will play a large part
in the case brought against PURA court case by Connecticut's energy
distributors. It seems obvious to
non-jurors that if the PURA Commission is not in compliance with the enabling
stature that created the PURA board – and it is not – decisions made by a
non-compliant board cannot be in
compliance with the law.
Gillett has her supporters and
detractors.
Connecticut’s energy distributors are in the process of
suing Gillett’s PURA for the following reasons. Energy distribution is not
energy production. The proper free market way to lower costs is to increase the
production of energy, but the distributors targeted by Gillett do not produce
energy. We must punish the producer of milk, not the milkman, if we wish artificially
to reduce the price of milk. The real price of a product or service is properly
set by producers and buyers in a free market. Price control through the force majeure of government simply
distorts creative and responsible free market contracting between sellers and
buyers. Then too, the statute that created PURA requires that decisions be made
by a five member commission. Presently, there are three neglected members on
the PURA board, and those bringing suit argue that since the PURA commission is
not in compliance with statutory law, neither are unilateral decisions made by
Gillett. In addition, those suing PURA allege that the illegal three commission
board is little more than a false Potemkin village front designed to cover and
obscure the non-statutory decisions made by Gillette.
All such claims likely will be vented and verified during
the pending court action, assuming that Connecticut judges chosen and seated by
majority Democrats are not mere appendages of the dominant party in power.
Following an affirmative Gillett renomination vote in the
Senate -- minus Republicans -- Looney claimed, according to a Hartford Courant report, “he was
‘an agnostic’ on whether the PURA board should be expanded to five members. The
board, he said, works well with three members, adding that he is satisfied with
Gillett’s work.” Looney added, “The fact that the utilities don’t like her
[Gillett] is proof she is doing a good job.”
Perhaps Looney meant to say the utilities distaste for a
political command economy is proof that there should be no free market in
Connecticut that meets the energy needs of his political constituents.
Politicians, we know from bitter experience, do not always say what they mean
or mean what they say.
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