Via Thudfactor, I discovered the following editorial by Paul Farhi: When the Blue Chips Are Down, in Gov We Trust. (The article also appeared in the Washington Post, but the Post doesn’t freely archive their content, so they get no linky love from me):

Let us now praise slothful, inefficient, bloated government. Let us now rejoice in the glory of your trillions of tax dollars at work. Drop what you’re doing and hug a GS-14.

The point of the article is pretty simple: government screws up, but so does private industry. About as obvious a point as one could make… and yet somehow it always seems to get missed in all those breathless articles in the biz/tech mags.

For some reason I’ve been thinking about this the last couple of days, ever since the “Smoking Gun” memos in the Enron case came to light. Here we have Enron’s own lawyers admitting that they resold power among their own subsidiaries to provoke a crisis and drive up prices, and that they routed power out of congested areas in order to off-load less power than their contract required. Remember that vast criminal conspiracy that we suspected last year? In the immortal words of Lily Von Shtupp, “It’s twue! It’s twue!”

Not that I expect any apologies from the insufferable Cato Institute for calling us Californians a bunch of “dim bulbs” and “whiners”. Nor do I expect recompense for the hours I wasted last year listening to pundits smugly informing us that gee, if only we would get out of our hot tubs and learn how to deregulate our markets the right way, we would be out of this mess in a jiffy. (Never mind that despite the power crisis and the tech recession, California has overtaken France to become the the fifth largest economy in the world… but what do we patchouli-wearing dim bulbs know about business anyway?) And I’m pretty sure nobody, least of all any of those “poor ex-Enron employees” is going to refund a penny of the extra dough I had to shell out last year on my utility bill. But honestly, who cares about a few hundred bucks? What price vindication, I ask you?