NanoThoughts 1.0

Actually, I think your problem is with monopolies. In a true energy market the customers would flee from Enron to other providers (and Enron would never dare to do such a thing). Which is why I'm ok with regulating monopolies as several self-correcting market mechanisms are not present in a monopolistic economy.

Yeah, you have a point about monopolies, but I really think there are things that should not be privatized and electricity is one of them. Even if you had a bunch of competitive private companies out there selling energy, there might be some markets where they would think that they couldn't make any money, so they wouldn't provide energy for those markets. This would be disastrous for these affected places. i.e. I believe that we'd be better served by a public service that maybe had to run at a loss but would still provide energy for these people.

Yeah, knew about this stuff from Greg Palast's reporting. Check out [i]The Best Democracy Money Can Buy[/i], chapter on energy deregulation for a more complete overview of the situation.