 in a message dated NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER am jamesr URL writes this situation wouldn t have happened in the first place if california didn t have economically insane regulations they created a regulatory climate that facilitated this so yes it is the product of over regulation which is to say if you reduce the argument to absurdity that law causes crime yes i agree that badly written law can make life so frustrating that people have little choice but to subvery it if they want to get anything done this is also true of corporate policies and all other attempts to regulate conduct by rules rules just don t work well when situations are fluid or ambiguous but i don t think that the misbehavior of energy companies in california can properly be called well intentioned lawbreaking by parties who were trying to do the right thing but could do so only by falling afoul of some technicality if you want to get to root causes we should probably go to the slaying of abel by cain perhaps we can figure out what went wrong then and roll our learning forward through history and create a forktopia nonpartisanly which is to say casting stones on all houses whether bicameral or unicameral built on sand or on rock to the left of them or to the right of them of glass or brick or twig or straw tom 