Energy deregulation article by AP writer Ryan Keith–free market failure or bad journalism?

For the two regular readers of my blog (Hi Mom! Hi, uh, Me!), I apologize for the long delay–my company eliminated my position so I am in the middle of a job hunt. Apparently none of my experience qualifies me to do anything, so I spend my days looking for a job while worrying about providing for my wife and two young girls. Not conducive to updating my already-infrequently-updated blog.

Still, the other day an article in our local paper caught my attention–it was an AP article by Ryan Keith regarding energy deregulation. In our paper the headline was “Bills soar with electric deregulation”. It was damn-near a whole page article on the failures of deregulation. After an opening anecdote about a small businesswoman struggling because her utilities bill in a deregulated state (presumably Illinois, where the article originated from) went from $800 to $1,800 a month, the article boldly states “Not one of the 16 states–plus the District of Columbia–that have pushed forward with deregulation since the late 1990s can call it a success.” Wow, that’s pretty damn bold.

I have neither the time nor the energy to investigate all of his supporting research, at least not right now. Unlike most Republicans and, I figure, most libertarians, who are predominantly skeptical of the media, I was an editor of my high school newspaper and a journalism major in college so I bring with me a bias of knowing a fair number of people in journalism and I know that most of them most of the time do their damnest to write a story right. Sometimes they are hampered by not understanding the source material well enough, and you could say that it’s irresponsible to write about something when you aren’t extremely familiar with the history/underlying science/etc. There is surely some truth to that, but if you’re here to read about me lambasting the media for being overtly leftist you’ve come to the wrong place.

So now I come back to Ryan Keith’s article. Is deregulation such a terrible failure? Often when I hear “deregulation” and “failure” paired together it brings to mind “deregulation” schemes that were half-assed at best, but that is stereotype. A quick Google reveals that not everyone is so down on energy deregulation . . .

But who are we kidding, really? This is the kind of issue where the vast majority of the population, at best, has a marginal understanding of the energy market. This reminds me strongly of the Cato series in November 2006 on the potential failings of Democracy. In that series there was some discussion about how a voter can possibly understand many of the pertinent, complex issues facing the citizenry today. I would argue that energy markets fall into such a category. The price of energy is one of the most important issues in our day-to-day lives, but many people will base their votes in upcoming elections on, for example, religious issues such as homosexuality, or vote without research, or vote solely based on biased sources.

Hell, politicians, whom we entrust to make decisions on our behalf, rarely know enough to make something resembling an informed decision. Lawmakers & policymakers who can’t distinguish between Sunnis and Shiites; lawmakers who propose legislation when they don’t even understand what kind of impact it’s intended to have . . . politicians can’t be trusted to know what’s going on, so that leaves it up to us, doesn’t it?

Which of course leads into topics such as source bias and how one goes about getting through it without spending an inordinate amount of time on each and every complex issue. How do you trust yourself to come to a conclusion when you know that your only true exposure to it is an AP article (if you can get through the whole thing over breakfast)?

So you work through source bias to get to the core of an issue, and determine that you are going to be outvoted significantly at the polls by people who haven’t done as much work as you have on the topic. Or that most of the people in polls (assuming you can trust those) agree with you, except politicians blunder ahead in the opposite direction despite popular opinion.

So you’ve chosen a complex topic to become a better citizen by researching it, you’ve done enough work to manage through source bias, and now you’re disenfranchised.

So I guess the next topic I’m going to have to research is how someone can be an optimist in a world where you spend most of your time treading water, overwhelmed at the sheer quantity of information you would have to know in order to be a good citizen and knowing that doing so only further reveals the madness of the mob.

You can go through this same analysis for just about every topic of any complexity, so am I right to be depressed over it all or am I just going through a cyclical phase of cynicism?