Dire Consequences

On behalf of everyone else who is concerned about the freedom of poor people to choose between heating and eating, investment bankers and the energy cartel are squealing about Labour's latest proposal to give regulators the power to regulate. "This is a very complicated market," warned an investment banker, who raised the spectre of regulators concluding that prices should rise. At the moment, of course, prices and profits rise when costs rise; and when costs fall, profits rise while prices stay about the same or else rise slightly less than they might have done, depending on what everyone else in the cartel happens to think they can get away with. Clearly, all is for the best in this best of all possible markets, and excessive regulation can only mean that prices might possibly rise anyway, which is the very thing competition and the free market are designed by God to prevent.