Politics & Power Quote by Sherwood Boehlert

“Market failures” is the most technocratic phrase in the sentence, and also the most political. Boehlert is smuggling a moral argument through an economist’s side door: if the energy system is broken, it isn’t just because consumers make bad choices or because prices are “too high,” but because the market is structurally incapable of pricing what matters. Pollution, climate risk, national security, grid resilience, long-term R&D, and infrastructure lock-in are all costs and benefits that spill across borders and decades. Left to itself, the market underinvests, procrastinates, and free-rides.

The intent is defensive as much as it is visionary. Boehlert frames government intervention not as ideology but as maintenance: fixing a known, textbook malfunction. “Classic” does work here, reassuring moderates and skeptics that this is boring, standard economics, not a radical grab. It’s a rhetorical move common to center-right pragmatists and science-friendly Republicans of his era: acknowledge capitalism’s strengths while insisting it has blind spots that only public policy can correct.

The subtext is a rebuttal to a familiar American reflex: that government action is automatically coercive, wasteful, or illegitimate. Boehlert preempts that by redefining government as “the vehicle for collective action in a democracy” - not an alien force, but the mechanism by which individuals do together what they can’t do alone. The sentence quietly shifts responsibility upward: if the problem is collective, then refusing collective action isn’t neutrality. It’s a choice to let the failure persist.