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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Roger A. Babb who wrote (132638)	3/21/2001 11:09:52 AM
From: dave rose	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

<<<Yes, the shortages will go away if the consumer price is increased enough. But why should the consumers be forced to pay 40 cents for a 7 cent product?>>> You still don't understand supply and demand(one of the oldest and least understood by liberals of Econ 101). They should pay 40 cents because that is the price they charge in a FREE economy. If you don't like it, make your own electricity, conserve, or go without. Sounds hard but that is the solution.

To: Roger A. Babb who wrote (132638)	3/21/2001 11:12:41 AM
From: willcousa	Respond to of 769670

He should be forced to pay more because he is willing to pay more.

To: Roger A. Babb who wrote (132638)	3/21/2001 11:45:46 AM
From: Gordon A. Langston	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

CA has(had) a partially de-regulated system. The defects of the system were exposed when utilities found themselves unable to buy power through long term contracts, a very normal activity in other industries to avoid price spikes. This was not a regulated monopoly that had worked in the past nor an unregulated one like Penn. Now we are at the mercy of some less than ethical power generators but I do not blame them but the politicians that devised this idiotic fantasy. It is an artificial market of controlled price and uncontrolled demand coupled with regulations that inhibit new power plants. The chaos and threats of confiscation of generating plants sounds like creeping state socialism. I think the power generators are playing hardball to overcome the regulatory resistance in CA to building new plants and to eliminate the false market.

To: Roger A. Babb who wrote (132638)	3/21/2001 4:04:34 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

The consumer will only be forced to pay 40 cents for a while- -if governments get out of the way and allow markets to work. If power generators are reaping 1000% profits, other companies will quickly be circling like hawks. New electric power sources will pop up. And the price will drop to the 3-7 cent range. If governments will do what is needed to help that happen, like allow the plants to be built. Here in Silicon Valley the San Jose City Council voted down a new power plant in its city limits- -in spite of the power crisis. Fortunately, the state and not the city has the final word and that plant may get built yet. In another city (I don't remember the name), a company wants to build a peaker plant near a working class neighborhood. The usual liberal suspects have crawled out of the woodwork screaming about economic racism, apparently a variant of NIMBY. If attitudes like these persist, we can just turn out the lights and leave the state. Remember the oil crisis in the '70s? Oil shot up to $30 a barrel. Some years later, it was less than a third of that. What happened? That high price inspired the hunt for oil and for new techniques to get more out of existing wells. The North Sea came on line, then the North Slope, and many other new oil fields, and the price of oil plummeted. For a decade, OPEC was a hollowed-out hulk; only recently has it regained anything like its previous power, and it is being much more circumspect this time, not wanting to re-inspire the moves that destroyed it before.