Consumers shouldn't have to waste time sorting through products that are broken from day 1 in non-obvious ways.
They're broken via legislation, not any fundamental part of the product.
You charge people a lot of money for electricity, and then this motivates them to learn it. A lot of 'byzantine' things are routine. A lot of the rituals we do with computers today would seem incredibly bizarre, and difficult to a person from 200 years ago. For example, on PCs, I hit the 'return' key to make a new line. Or on most computers, Cmd/Ctrl-V is often used to paste things. What does the letter V have to do with pasting anything? It's completely arbitrary and byzantine and the knowledge is frankly rarely mentioned and it's unclear to me how anyone learns it other than by mentorship. And yet, the entire population is more than happy to engage.
I challenge you to understand that, while this may seem reasonable to you, is not how humans operate. Especially in a household of multiple humans over which you have little/no direct control over, and multiple changes within a given month (the typical billing period for electricity). If you, your partner, your son, and your daughter have all gotten new, power hungry devices, and it's now also winter/snowing outside/aka the bill is expected to be high due to seasonal heating costs, and the a new, punitive rate plan has been put into effect, how could a non-technical consumer even start to address the change in electrical cost? Other than pay the now-exorbitant bill.
Regulations are the answer for the real world where people live. We can debate what the regulations themselves should say, but expecting human nature to suddenly change and that everyone should want to get an EE degree in their free time, just because their electricity bill is mysteriously higher, is not how I would approach trying to effect large sweeping cultural changes. Not when we can't even get a quorum of people vaccinated.
The biggest problem with libertarian solutions is that they're regressive taxes, politically presented as "freedom".
"Letting the market decide" is not a form of regulation.
The main goal of libertarians is to get prices to work. The alternative that i fear we are heading towards is price controls then mandated requirements for output. E.g produce 100 loafs of bread today that will sell for $1.00 or off to jail you go.
> raise taxes on electricity and the free market will sort it out.