(Bas van der Schot cartoon / caglecartoons.com) America’s high national living standards lead us to consider things like abundant access to clean water, comprehensive cellular service and a reliable electric grid commonplace. Much of the rest of the world regards them as luxuries unavailable to many people. Consequently, we tend to think about these things only when they don’t work. Cloudy water creates a crisis. A cell phone outage leaves us stranded. Failures in the power market leave us, literally and figuratively, in the dark about what to do. The critics of how the market allocates the distribution of electric power allege competition would lead to more brown- and blackouts. Despite abundant evidence they are wrong, they don’t trust the competitive market system to keep the lights on.