Some interesting and well-presented work on Eschaton today about the California energy crisis and the perils of deregulation. Not much I can add to it, really, except to highlight the fundamentally political (instead of economic) nature of economic debate online, where economic theories are often picked and chosen depending on whichever political ideology the chooser adheres to. Economics remains a social science, after all, and any social science will feature even more innumerable competing theories than the still-competitive natural sciences. That's not a bug, it's a feature- unless you have somebody (not naming any names) who thinks that all intelligent, honest economists agree on most issues, and is constantly attempting to prove as much.

(Heck, some of the most intelligent people I've ever met were Marxian political economists, and I can't begin to describe all the problems I have with that system.)

Edit: leave out one quotation mark and the whole post goes straight to...