<It WAS regulation, government controls, the stifling of creativity and innovation with bureaucratic parasites ruling over hard-working, ever-efficient executives trying to make the American way available at a reasonable cost for everyone.

Despite the sarcasm, you are pretty much right on the mark.

No one ever claimed that private industries were always efficient, or even honest, although any reasonable observer could see that their record is better than most government bureaucrats. The difference between a free market and a mixed economy is that in a free market corporate screwups aren't forced on all of the rest of us at the point of a gun.

Cynical libertarians have referred to corporations who support mixed economy solutions as wanting their successes and profits to be "free enterprise," while their failures and losses are "socialized," or spread around to the taxpayers. The history of the American banking system is a case in point.

The California power companies, like PG and E, are far from blameless in this fiasco. They leaped on the new regulations enthusiastically, thinking they could work this dog's breakfast of regulations to their own advantage.

It was a liberal plot to try to see that everyone paid as much as possible to Large Corporations through regulation and more regulation.

No, a "plot" would imply some sort of rational plan. This was a complete screwup by people who have no idea on Earth how the laws of economics work.

I guess I missed it. (I could have sworn the price they could charge was de-regulated while the price they paid was kept low. Silly me.)

Yeah. You missed it. The price charged to consumers for power was fixed at a low rate by the regulations. The price that the power generators could charge the power companies for power was allowed to find its own level.

This is like the grocery story having to pay whatever the farmer wants for hard-to-get produce, but having to charge an artificially low price on the grocery shelf. Who's going to go broke here?

But again, PG and E went into this with both eyes open, thinking they were going to make a killing, and I have difficulty
scraping up a lot of sympathy for their ignorance of supply and demand.