Brenda,

Hope all is well, I am quite familiar with Calabasas, and have done a considerable amount of business throughout the San Fernando Valley and up in the nicer sections of Calabasas, Woodland Hills, Agoura Hills, Westlake Village and Thousand Oaks too. Simi Valley has sure grown and Moorpark - Wow!

You ask: "Do you know how many people would be out of jobs or how much tax revenue would be lost if we didn't have to pay the electric company or the gas company or the water company?"

Well these of course are Utility Companies regulated by the government and are not actually government agencies at all as you know, they appear to be quasi-government agencies like the USPS or IRS, but the Water, Power, Gas companies are not. If they had to compete, they would become more efficient and perhaps make more money and perhaps they might lay off some folks, but efficiency and competition would lower prices.

California, botched the deregulation of energy pretty badly, due to stupidity in my opinion, at least that is the view at our Online Think Tank. De-regulation has done wonders for other industries; Airlines, Shipping, Trucking for instance - it has lowered prices, protectionism and regulation amounts to what Adam Smith warned us about. Ayn Rand is right on that account as well, and the author of Das Capital was dead wrong, I think Milton Friedman would stand by me on this.

Brenda,

In your second question you ask; "Why doesn't the housing industry use solar panels when building a home?"

This was a huge topic in "Building Industry News" magazine for a good nine months at the top of the bubble. The reason as stated is because putting solar panels on the home raised the price of the home some $30,000 minimum. It also increased liability for major builders, with all the lawsuits housing developers set up shell corporations that they close as soon if not right before the final home is built, this prevents class action lawsuits.

Even adding $1500 worth of insulation or a better fitting door or $3,000 for double pained windows was not done, this saves $1,000s per year on energy bills. The reason for that as stated is because raising the price of the homes an extra $3,000 means some folks would not qualify for the low or no-down financing. In hindsight, well obviously many of these folks had no business buying a home at all. They could not even buy a $1,400 chicken coup for cash, and yet they were sold homes for $250,000 to $450,000 with no money down, marginal credit and questionable statements on their loan application forms. But, I need not tell you this, more of an education for others reading this.

Solar Panels make sense, make what you can, when you are not using it, "grid bank" it selling it back to the grid allowing your electric meter to run backwards, everyone wins, no need to worry about capacity in power lines for demand and on hot days it helps prevent brown and rolling blackouts due to high usage from air-conditioners.

Now then certainly, the developers and builders of new housing tracts could have done this and their economies of scale would have fostered new innovation, research and free-enterprise would have filled in all the blanks and lowered the cost, it was a great time for that opportunity, which is gone now. Our Online Think Tank; http://www.worldthinktank.net/ discussed this at length during the run up to the bubble pop. You are preaching to the choir of course, but those are the arguments and debate points on that topic. - Lance

Brenda,

In order to allow everyone else to get the full benefit from all this, I am going to make all your questions into Blog posts and you can read them that way, I think it will help and you are a superstar of humanity to bring these points up, I really mean that, we need this dialogue so badly. = Lance

Mary,

Thanks, I have completed and made them into 5-different Blog Topics, I totally agree that Brenda is right in asking these tough questions, as it is time to ditch the excuses of the status quo and move our homes and civilization forward - Lance