Comment The Free Market Works (Score 0) 551
Those citing California (and other) "deregulation" attempts as evidence of a need for more regulation are entirely full of it! I live in California and do recall what occurred however this was a result of BAD regulation not DEregulation. In a free market consumers MUST have the choice to say NO. If you install a third party who buys on behalf power of the grid (ISO) and then give them a mandate to buy AT ANY PRICE when conditions warrant then that is NOT A FREE MARKET! And.... it can never work,
Consumers should have had access to whatever power was being produced by their chosen supplier at whatever rates THEY had negotiated with the supplier. If their supplier was not providing sufficient power to service all of their customers then those consumers could take their dollars elsewhere or pay high rates to keep their power on. Either way at each point the consumer must have the choice to say no I will not pay $1000 for this kwh (and who the hell would other than the ISO?)
When deregulation "failed" California threw out the baby with the bathwater. Admittedly the bath water was a fetid stinking slurry of disgust created by the legislature for their energy industry cronies, but the idea of deregulation was a good one.
To say that deregulation did not work is to completely misunderstand what was actually done and how an actual free market actually works.