Regulators helped pull plug.

ITEM: Writing in the New York Times for August 16th. Robert Kuttner claimed: "In the search fop" the source of Thursday's blackout, the underlying cause has been all but ignored: deregulation." Kuttner, co-editor of" The American Prospect, continued: "In principle, deregulation of the power industry was supposed to use the discipline of free markets to generate just the right amount of electricity at the right price. But electric power, it turns out, is not like ordinary, commodities."

BETWEEN THE LINES: Fans of central planning have been rather quick to blame deregulation for the blackout. Yet energy remains one of the most regulated areas in the U.S. economy, combining licensed monopolies and an industry brimming with price controls.

The blackout generated plenty of unfounded allegations. Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.), for instance, essentially blamed the matter on tax cuts. While details are still being uncovered, it is known that failures occurred at the transmission level. This is an area--as repot-red by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, among others--"where almost no deregulation has occurred." In the New York Post, the Cato Institute's Jerry Taylor and Peter VanDoren suggested deregulating the grid, throwing away state regulations that protect transmission companies from competition, and permitting the owners of the grid to find out for themselves how to run their businesses more efficiently.