Getting charged for a product you are NOT using?
That is roughly akin to being FORCED at gun point to pay a “voluntary tax” or with the same government gun to be forced to buy “health insurance”...
IOW... I can easily see our political Master’s doing exactly this to help benefit their re-election campaign coffers.
That is roughly akin to being FORCED at gun point to pay a “voluntary tax” or with the same government gun to be forced to buy “health insurance”...
Similar to the government buying Covid vaccines, then forcing people to use them.
Must be nice for businesses when the government forces people to pay for your product.
With Government efficiency being defined as how many things they can make you do in that gun pointing incident.
Over the long term, it works in that private investors put up the capital to build and maintain utility plants and grids and get a reliable rate of return on their investment. This relieves utility customers from getting assessed arbitrarily for the capital needed to provide utility service.
In the alternative, local governments may establish their own electric utility and set rates and terms of service. They use local taxes to establish and support the utility and the local government gets the benefit of any profit generated.
Local politicians and the private interests aligned with them can also use the utility to benefit themselves in many sneaky ways. Since the utility is publicly owned, there is usually no outside utility regulator to complain to other than the local government that owns and benefits from the utility.
Can private utilities also abuse the regulatory system? Yes, there are many ways, so state legislators, the public, and specialized consumer advocates keep a close watch on the regulator and on the utilities. In practice, economists and customers usually find that privately owned utilities are better run and more honest than government ones.
As for being "forced" to pay for a product that you are not using, there is a simple answer: go off the grid. Install enough solar power, batteries, and the like to meet all or most of your home power needs. When you run the numbers though, you are almost certain to find that buying power from the local utility makes more financial choice.
Indeed, you have the right to go to the local utility and make them connect you to the grid and provide you with electric power that is cheaper than you can get it on your own. When you look at the system that way, you have the upper hand in that you get to force a private company to serve you on terms that benefit you.
Fascism.
We went to war over taxes with no representation along with government abuse 250 years ago.
History does not repeat, but it does rhyme.