Wow so 1 mess up vs the regular robberies and mess ups of private companies
Mess up? They got taken for a free energy scam. Worse. They got taken with a free energy scam for our tax money.
Besides, these guys mess up all of the time. Everyone is complaining about power outages in Texas. I live in Canada and power outages are standard for storms. It's not particularly rare for some people to be without power for a week or more. And being without power in Canada in January or February is a hell of a lot more dire than being without power in Texas.
The difference is that when a private company messes up enough, it gets replaced by a more competent competitor. When a public company messes up, they just transfer funds from the taxpayer to keep their Ponzi scheme afloat (and again, I'm talking about a LITERALY Ponzi Scheme, here).
Look, I'm not against public companies. I think they are the best way to go in a lot of instances where profit models threaten the wellbeing of citizens who simply can't pay (water delivery, for instance, is better done through a public system because we don't want people or neighborhoods going without clean water just because delivery might be unprofitable).
I'll even admit that power might fall into that category (it's on the line for me, because, unlike clean water, there are so many different options available for generating heat and light).
But I'm not going to pretend that there's some overwhelming body of evidence suggesting that public power companies do it any better than private ones. They don't. You're looking at one incident that resulted from a freakish weather pattern. I don't know the ins and outs of what happened there, but it does look like they fucked up, so I'm fine to concede that point. But to act like public companies don't fuck up just as badly all of the time, especially during freak events? Naw. That's just playing dumb. Won't do it.
