My point was that simple a-priori logic of the kind you offered regularly fails. A fast-food restaurant who wants to keeps its machines running has profit-drive

My point was that simple a-priori logic of the kind you offered regularly fails. A fast-food restaurant who wants to keeps its machines running has profit-driven feedback loops of a radically different nature than those of an energy market (esp. when such a market has natural monopolies). And likewise, markets are amoral. If the "market" opts for a failure every decade over a higher-priced day-to-day run... this isnt "rational" or "correct" or "ethical" or whatever. The way a market happens to function is amoral. You can make the argument that over fairly short time horizons in non-critical areas "meeting consumer demand" in most cases has a certain consequentialist justification. This doesnt carry over, a-priori to all possible cases. Ie., it is quite reasonable for a society via a democratic expression of ethical judgement to say "the market is not here considering the long-term impact in the right ethical manner"... ie., that being without power when it's -20 outside & affecting the whole population in ways not priced in by the market is a *moral failure*. It is the prerogative of the collective to say at once "here's how it should be", rather than via iterated interactions "here's how its happened to be".