I wonder how people survived freezing weather before HVAC systems.
> Government regulation would have prevented the prices from skyrocketing
The Law of Supply & Demand is always in play, meaning price caps result in shortages. According to your post, shortages mean people will freeze to death.
Their houses were built differently, for one.
To that point, an article [0] published shortly after indicates that 61% of all homes in Texas used electrical heating rather than Natural Gas. While -yes-, you still typically need electricity to run a gas heater, the grid demands are certainly much lower compared to an electric heater.
[0] - https://ajot.com/news/texas-uses-natural-gas-for-electricity...
I think people who want prices controlled are thinking of doing it by controlling demand via rationing. Some people don't get all the power they want at any price, so others can get a minimal amount.
If someone wrote an OS that starved low priority processes of run time, you wouldn't say it was a law of nature, you'd say the scheduler should be fixed, right?
Is it meant to be a logical truth, independent of empirical facts? To me, it's a contingent fact even though it often is true. Nor do I see any reason to be certain that rationing which does cause some misallocation necessarily creates net harm.
Do you believe that markets can be evaluated based on some independent standard of appropriate allocation of goods and services?
Every house I've lived in had a fireplace.