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The California brown-outs were caused by Enron and others manipulating the energy market, which was a direct result of deregulation. The reality is that for the most part deregulation in various industries has made a few people very rich, but has been a bad thing for consumers.

That is not what caused the brown-outs. Sure Enron and other made money from it but they did not cause the problem. The problem was caused by the state government. Traders like Enron used state laws to do what they did. Partial deregulation was in fact reregulation. The new laws stipulated that electrical generators could not also own the electrical distribution cables. Also while generators could raise their prices to distributors, those distributors could not raise their prices to energy users without government permission. Consumer rates would be frozen With energy traders such as Enron buying electrical units prices went up which left distributors up a tree, they had to pay higher prices but could not raise their prices. That wasn’t deregulation!

Policy Debate: Has Deregulation Caused the Energy Shortage in California? "As an economist, whenever I hear the word "shortage" I wait for the other shoe to drop. That other shoe is usually "price control." So it was no great surprise to discover, after the electric power shortage in California made headlines, that there were price controls holding down the price of electricity to the consumers."

"Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric were required to charge consumers no more than 6.5 per kilowatt hour until March 2002. Because this rate had become much lower than the market rate, both utilities began to lose vast sums of money because they had to purchase power at the unregulated market rates."

Do you still want to call what happened in CA deregulation? If so then you don't know what deregulation is, which the removal of regulations without other regulations being added. However you're not the only one to think that way. To most reporters as well as the public the problem in CA was deregulation, that everything was deregulated when it was not. Sellers to end users could not raise prices but generators and trades not only could but did raise their prices to those sellers.

Falcon

Interesting articles, thanks for sharing.

I'm not sure of the relative weight of factors that create inequality (tax vs federal reserve vs looser regulation vs allowed monopolies, etc..), but taxes surely must be one of them.
marginal tax rate vs profit of top earners
Notice every dip in taxes corresponds neatly to a higher percent of total income going to the top earners.

Your pdf mentions that since the 70's, nearly all regulation and tax structures have been based on 'trickle down'. Well, we know how well that works (not at all).

This is a good article that lists other factors that create inequality. list of factors (middle of the page)
The factors:
1. regressive tax policy
2. decline of labor unions
3. min. wage not keeping up
4. globalization
5. lax regulation

Vermont is the only state that has no gun licensing or permits of any kind. They would have low gun crime because they are vermont. But you did say freely carry so I digress. Also you would be wrong anyways unless you have some good citations. Below I provide links allowing you to compare gun law strictness to gun deaths by state.

http://newsbatch.com/gc-stateglaw.html
http://newsbatch.com/gc-regionowndeath.html

Since it isn't obvious enough from that picture I bothered getting the raw data and punched it all into excel to make a pretty graph just for you!:
http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/7756/gunlaws.png

Proving you fairly definatively wrong. Please /. mods don't mod people up unless they've done some homework.

Vermont is the only state that has no gun licensing or permits of any kind. They would have low gun crime because they are vermont. But you did say freely carry so I digress. Also you would be wrong anyways unless you have some good citations. Below I provide links allowing you to compare gun law strictness to gun deaths by state.

http://newsbatch.com/gc-stateglaw.html
http://newsbatch.com/gc-regionowndeath.html

Since it isn't obvious enough from that picture I bothered getting the raw data and punched it all into excel to make a pretty graph just for you!:
http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/7756/gunlaws.png

Proving you fairly definatively wrong. Please /. mods don't mod people up unless they've done some homework.

Modifying gun laws does not mean banning guns. Regulating all secondary market sales could help.

"Over twenty states regulate all secondary sales through registration or licensing requirements. In the states that have no such regulation, the secondary market allows minors and criminals to easily obtain weapons. This is the so-called "gun show" loophole."
Quotation from this helpful site on the issue

Neither of those things will make your health care affordable though, the only way it will be affordable is if you tax wealthy Americans more and use their money to pay for it. Which to me, just seems a bit too socialist.

I hate it when just because you want to tax those who have more that you're "socialist". It's stupid poo-flinging arguments like that which've made it so that 45 million Americans are uninsured. Let me quote myself in a post I made earlier on /.:

Just look at the Toyota plant in Ontario [harpers.org]; The company turned down hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies in the United States because, when compared to Canadians, U.S. workers are too hard to train, often illiterate, and expensive to insure. Also according to General Motors Corp. chairman and chief executive G. Richard Wagoner Jr. the American car manufacturers are losing [washingtonpost.com] their ability to compete in the global marketplace in large measure because of the crushing burden of health care costs.
The US is the only industrial country without a national healthcare system. We're the most dissatisfied [umaine.edu] out of the top ten. Pay almost twice as much [newsbatch.com] as number two. Yet still 45 millions are uninsured [census.gov].

You're saying to me that it's not in the best interest of the rich to have insured Americans? As Adam Smith said; it's justified to take from the rich as it's them who benefit the most from the smooth functioning of the state.

One very fallacious error that leftists make is that they claim that government should be "compassionate" and forcibly take money from the most successful in society and give it to the poor because all rich people are selfish (or some other theme).
(Mind you, it's Progressives/Social Democrats and populists who like to dish out at the rich. True Liberals don't).

Why should we take from the rich and give to the poor?

Just look at the Toyota plant in Ontario; The company turned down hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies in the United States because, when compared to Canadians, U.S. workers are too hard to train, often illiterate, and expensive to insure. Also according to General Motors Corp. chairman and chief executive G. Richard Wagoner Jr. the American car manufacturers are losing their ability to compete in the global marketplace in large measure because of the crushing burden of health care costs.
The US is the only industrial country without a national healthcare system. We're the most dissatisfied out of the top ten. Pay almost twice as much as number two. Yet still 45 millions are uninsured.

You're saying to me that it's not in the best interest of the rich to have insured Americans? As Adam Smith said; it's justified to take from the rich as it's them who benefit the most from the smooth functioning of the state.

Less than it does now?

I've heard estimates that suggest up to ten percent of spending on healthcare in the U.S. is related to billing and insurance issues--just figuring out who has to pay for what. Public health care at least solves that problem, plus it usually fixes a schedule of fees and precisely delineates what procedures are covered.

As for medical costs: http://www.newsbatch.com/healthcare.htm

Another serious problem is that the system is stacked against workers at all income levels who have medical problems. Not only are they unable to obtain insurance, their condition often prevents them from obtaining employment from employers who offer medical insurance because they are bad risks.

As for the study on racism, they controlled for all factors and still found blacks were 3.9 times more likely to get the death penalty in the same circumstances.

The ketchup thing (I say "ketchup", you say " catsup", etc :-) would have been passed except for the public outcry. In today's atmosphere, it would probably have passed unnoticed.

Look at all the garbage already in force or trying to be foisted on the population that would have been unheard of 5 years ago. The PATRIOT Act. INDUCE. The whole Department of Homeland Security (has a Stalinist/1984 ring to it, don't you think?).

They come up ever so often under the term of tort reform and "looser pays". The biggest problem is that most of this comes down to a state decision, however it is something that we in the USA will have to solve because of the problems it is leading to in the area of medical and social affairs.
As an example of how bad it is, the Las Vegas casinos were offered information on terrorist activities around various casinos, they declinded because once they know about the threats they will have more problems with the lawyers if anything happens then then whatever possible damage the terrorist could do.
Here is one article on 2004 US election. The American tort reform association has article detailing the various changes that various stats are doing.

I have no reason to doubt that the French have a lovely distribution network. And believe me, they pay dearly for it in their electric bills and taxes.

No I don't believe you. As far as I know, France has one of the lowest electricity prices in Europe, and moreover exports quite a large size of it to neighbouring country. About 80% of it is made by nuclear central stations.