Andi - Good for you for standing your ground. I think that if just a small percentage of people actually pushed back on institutions when they fail, the world could be a better place.
I once had an engineering job in a manufacturing company where, if the power went off for five seconds, a whole day's worth of production was ruined. Power would go off six, eight, or fifteen times in a summer. Call the power company and they'd say "If the power is off less than five seconds it doesn't count." That was Detroit in the 1980's. MFG companies have been fleeing ever since.
It's hard to know whether deregulation makes things less expensive. In the airline industry I think it did - but I loathe air travel now. I'm not so sure deregulation made wireline service less expensive. I know that it was after deregulation that I began to think my phone bills were out of control. In my second microeconomics class in college we studied oligopoly theory which can explain why regulated monopolies could actually offer goods and services for less than unregulated companies can. I'm sure telephony technology is further along for deregulation; but I'm also pretty sure that wireline services are overpriced. The reason companies try to get us to repeat the mantra that "deregulation is good" is not because they expect it to decrease their profits!
