While I agree with you in general, there's the problem of The Tragedy of The Commons, not fully addressed by the Free Market. Or, perhaps, it's best stated as a problem of consumption exceeding production, or of limited supply. The Free Market doesn't account for all of the costs that usage of electricity imposes. There are third-party costs, so claiming that we should be able to buy whatever we want, spend our money however we want, is not as valud as it would be if we were buying pieces of art.
Secondly, because of inefficiency, every unit of energy saved represents a correspondingly large input of fossil fuel. (Note the somewhat interchangeable nature of the inputs...petroleum used to be a very large input to energy generation, but now is a fraction of a percent. That petroleum now goes to transportation.
Frankly, the conservative view would be to account for all of the third-party costs. It's the populist view to say that a person should be able to just buy whatever he wants and not account for other costs.
I'm not saying we should ban the bulbs. (As an aside, it's important to remember that they didn't ban them...they just instituted a performance standard.) I'm suggesting that in a larger picture, there are still some issues that are not being addressed either way.
I understand what you are saying, particularly with respect to inefficiency of electrical power generation. That is an area we could save huge amounts of energy, but I am not sure the technology is there yet to do things like replace high voltage transmission lines (where losses are staggering) or the like.
You said that the Free Market doesn’t account for all of the costs that usage of electricity imposes. There are third-party costs...just to make sure I understand the nature of what you reference (before I agree or disagree with that) could you provide a few examples?
But I do disagree with the characterization of my discussion as populist, which usually carries the stench of a shallow and emotional approach. I would say that my approach to the issue was much less shallow and populist (by far) than that of the politicians who passed this legislation. How is it populist to say a person should be able to buy what they want, particularly if performance is degraded and the alternative is cheaper? If the CFL lights were commercially viable, people would buy them, no questions asked.
This isn’t just a knee jerk, populist reaction. This is a case of government mandating what we should purchase. Just because they “banned” them by making a standard that it was impossible for them to meet, or banning them outright by fiat, the end result is the same.
I don’t see this as any different from the Colonial Americans being forced to purchase British tea.
And this is simply one example. Day by day, the government is closing its regulatory fist around all of us, doing it so slowly, incrementally and relentlessly that one day, the water in the pot will boil us in tyranny before we are aware and can jump out like the proverbial frog.
Many Americans think that day has already come. I don’t believe that.
Yet.