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Comment by throw1234651234 | Hacker News Reader

No. Role of government is to provide minimum standard of living for general population. A lot of people will freeze in Kaza, as basic necessities are a huge part of their monthly budget and price hike is too severe to handle.

"Let market sort itself" only works if government thinks about it in advance, have fair elections, low corruption, etc.

Cost of natural gas / coal / oil is going up significantly and is a huge problem for all of Europe (not just Eastern) at the moment. A lot of Eastern Europe will have rolling blackouts and need to buy power from Russia / Belarus. Kazakhstan is in the same boat in that regard. I would venture that they are probably still on the USSR power grid as well and can buy easily from Russia / Belarus.

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Almost all residential heating in big cities in Kazakhstan comes from cogeneration.

They would've gone bankrupt if they didn't do it with their weather (-40<C°)

So there is clearly a market for bitcoin cogen, either city scale or the scale of a single dwelling.

This is such a bizarre comment given the history of price controls and their horrendous outcomes.

Price controls on utilities in the US are extremely common and successful. There are good ways to implement price controls and there are bad ways. Also, there are just as many examples of bad outcomes when you treat markets which are inherently unfree (i.e utilites, where infrastructure is typically monopolized) as free markets.

Price controls are successful until they aren't. The US can subsidise an egregious amount of bad policies for a very long time I suspect, from agriculture to health, it's not really going to hurt as there are other parts of the diverse economy that can pay.

An better example would be Venezuela, with the largest oil reserves on Earth, they subsidised energy costs to an extreme extent and it was one of the things that drove them into the ground.

People seem to dislike my comment above, yet no one seems to be arguing for petrol to cost ten cents a litre. Why not subsidise fuel if doing such things has such a successful history in the United States?

Different markets have different dynamics, and therefore will react to economic interventions in different ways. Furthermore, the resulting effects of those interventions will have different impacts on consumers, depending on what the thing is. Any policy that is enacted will have multiple effects, and the determining factor in whether a policy will succeed or fail is whether those effects are acceptable.

For example, many EU countries have decided to enact policies that knowingly lead to high prices for motor vehicle petroleum, but this was decided to be acceptable because alternatives like public transportation exist, and are in many cases, preferable. Energy used to heat someone’s home is different in impact.

Venezuela’s economic issues are not a result of subsidies of petroleum for domestic use.

> Why not subsidise fuel if doing such things has such a successful history in the United States?

We do.

I think you mean history of generalized (applied to all products and services) price controls, especially in a planned economy. That definitely did not bring the hoped prosperity.

They seem to mean price controls for a limited number of essential goods and services, to ensure access to them for the least fortunate groups. Energy definitely seems to be part of this even in the most market-oriented societies.

One can look at cheap fossil fuels, and the unwillingness of Western governments to make them more expensive by integrating their negative pollution externalities into their consumer cost, as a sort of ad-hoc price control. Lots of social protests over living standards were triggered by increases in energy costs - the Gilets Jaunes in France for example.

Was working fine in Kazakhstan until the crypto folks showed up to utilize subsidized power.

Kicking Bitcoin miners off the grid seems like a great alternative to price controls.

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