Deregulated nirvana?

Regarding “With weak grid, Texas puts electricity profit ahead of reliability,” (Feb. 16): The recent power outages are what we get after 40 years of deregulation, brought on by too much special interest money in politics. As we're being reminded this week, some services are too vital to be turned over to the private sector, with minimal strings attached. As Chris Tomlinson points out, investing to make critical systems more resilient is expensive, and takes away from the bottom line. Unless required to do so by regulatory agencies, the power generators aren't going to make those investments. Since Ronald Reagan, we've been told by conservatives that “government isn't the solution to the problem, government is the problem!” with “regulations” being what starry-eyed libs want to force on hardworking, regular folks, so as to ruin their lives and undermine the American way. It’s time to acknowledge that government regulations aren’t all bad, and some are very necessary. We should want our government leaders to be watchdogs, but too often these days they are nothing more than lapdogs of business and industry.

David Bradley, Spring

How does that deregulated nirvana look now? Good regulations make for good goods and services. What do you think deregulated electricity is any better than deregulated medicine? Oops, bad comparison because now we all have to take the medicine that your bad choices have forced on us. Too bad there isn’t a vaccine against