When the lights go out

Lightning is a phenomenon not altogether unknown to utilities outside New York, and their lightning arresters are not always 100% reliable, either. The difference is that, as yet, they can afford to lose a line or two without disaster; New York can't. The bureaucrats and sham-environmentalists who killed the Storm King Project, shut down several coal-fired plants, made construction of further nuclear plants impossible, and did their utmost to shut down Indian Point, too, are the real culprits; they now call for the blood of Con Ed - more blood, that is.

But the game of the megawatts only scratches the surface. The rot that underlies it was illuminated by the lights that went out. For the uptown looters put into practice the theories emanating from the downtown penthouses.

True, the fashionable theories of replacing free markets by social legislation seek to use the force of law rather than the force of the crowbar, and their huge scope would not strike at random victims, but at the entire population.

But apart from these two points, how did the looting of the producers by the unproductive differ from the doctrine of income redistribution? When the looters took only one grand piano from a music store, but drove away with 50 new limousines from a car lot, how did that differ from the principle of progressive taxation? And how significantly did the arsonists differ from the social engineers in HEW and allied bureaucracies who laid waste acres of South Brooklyn, except that the latter did it legally and by the city block?

No wonder a wail of sympathy went up from the penthouses and newsrooms. ("A Robin-Hood-type-ofthing," mused a CUNY psychology professor.) In effect, the looters were chided only for doing lawlessly what should really be done by law, less crudely and on a vastly organized scale.

With some exceptions. Andrew Young had no need for such reservations. "When the lights go out," said he coolly, "people will steal;" and ever since, we take it, the delegates to the UN nervously clutch their pocketbooks when this Ambassador of the United States is in their proximity.

With power plant construction bogged down in a swamp of bureaucratic overregulation and obstructed by the sham- environmentalists, it is now almost too late to prevent widespread brownouts and blackouts by the early 1980's.

Is it too late to distinguish right from wrong, too?