HarmlessRabbit

I was answering your request <i>Since you think its such a horrible faliure, maybe you can give a few examples</i>.

You asked for information. I gave it to you. You agreed that it was correct then said the information doesn't matter. Enron was the largest bankruptcy in the history of the world. Perhaps you can show me some government sector failures on that scale? Or any massive failure of a government-run power system?

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From what I understand it was the price-fixing of the State government along with a 25% reliance on out of state power coupled with a draught which led to the mess. There wasn't a free market in CA, you had a artificially controlled one. It was the STUPID system set up by the govt of California which allowed them to dupe the public out of billions.

You understand incorrectly.

http://www.austinchronicle.com/issue...s_capitol.html

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Briefly, here's how a few of the scams worked: "Death Star": Enron would overschedule its expected power transmissions to create the illusion that the state's grid would be overloaded, then receive state payment for "relieving" the congestion. The beauty of this con, the company's memos noted, is that "Enron gets paid for moving energy to relieve congestion without actually moving any energy or relieving any congestion." It's the sort of protection deal that would make Tony Soprano proud. "Fat Boy": This scam (aka "Inc-ing") also involved overscheduling power transmission -- for example, to a company subsidiary that didn't really need all of it. Then Enron would sell the "excess" power to the state at a premium. "Ricochet": Also called "megawatt laundering" (by analogy to money laundering), Ricochet was the power equivalent of a real-estate land flip: buy in-state power cheaply, flip it out-of-state to an intermediary, then re-sell it to California at a highly inflated "imported" price. There were others, but you get the general idea: the only "invisible hand" in this pseudo-free market -- heavily promoted by Enron and its lobbyist allies -- was Enron's. The Enron memos also say that traders from other companies (with even larger interests in the California market) were doing the same, and now the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says it will force them to cough up the evidence. Yet California began complaining to FERC as early as May of 1999 that the big energy companies were manipulating the market for billions of dollars. The regulators did nothing.

Note that the FERC regulators were all Bush appointees.

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Also from what I read (and no I don't know of the source right now) there have been no new power plants in CA for quite a while, due to the stringent and very expensive regulations in California law. Its been a long time so I can't list them, but based on how crazy they are in my field, I can't see them being any better in the energy industry

There has not been a power crisis here since the fall of Enron. Yes, California has a lot of rules for constructing a power plant. We have a lot of environmental activists who care about the impact of power plants. We have earthquakes. We have a lot of people.

So, to get back to the original point. I like a lot of what Libertarianism has to say, but there are specific tenets to Libertarianism that I have a problem with, and one of those is that all free-markets are good.

Let's take a hypothetical situation. Let's completely deregulate the airline industry! After all, people are in control of their own actions! So, people will have to decide for themselves each time they board a plane whether the individual pilot is qualified. (we won't certify the pilot, too much regulation.) The plane is safe. (we won't have third-party inspectors, too much regulation.) And if the airport is well run. (again, no need for the FAA, too much regulation.) We'll also let the airlines themselves decide whether the pilot information and safety information should be public or secret, and free or for-sale.

Would this be workable? Of course not. When libertarians talk about the "free market" whether in power, in the stock market, or in airlines, they conveniently tend to overlook the massive amount of regulation required to make a "free market" work.

But again, I like a lot of the Libertarian Ideals, they just sometimes go too far.