Energy Secretary Rick Perry is being asked to consider using his emergency powers to force customers in the mid-Atlantic to buy their electricity from (more expensive) bankrupt coal and nuclear power plants. “We don’t have a free market in that [electricity] industry,” he said about this possibility of his intervention, “and I’m not sure you want one.”

Secretary Perry is half-right, but half-wrong. Electricity isn’t in a free market, but there is a market, and it ought to be free.