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Comment by dopylitty | Hacker News Reader

The cruelty is the point.

The US is a country where farmers destroy food while people go hungry. It’s a country where houses sit empty for months while people go homeless. It’s a country where one person amassed $200 billion while millions of others have to ration their life sustaining medications because they can’t afford to pay for them.

The economic system is totally unfit for purpose and the values system is completely inverted, valuing channeling wealth to the already wealthy while punishing those who aren’t every step they take.

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This. It is an intended feature, not a bug, and it's either willfully ignorant, stunningly uninformed, or intentionally malicious to obfuscate this. To whoever reflexively downvoted the parent comment just because it tells an uncomfortable truth about America: your actions are part of the problem.

I didn't downvote the comment, but this seems like an extraordinarily combative response to what you assume others are thinking about a pretty unclear issue. When you say it's an intended feature, for example, who is it specifically that intends the feature? I've never seen anyone say it's a good thing for poor people to go without electricity, but perhaps you have.

Generally anyone who believes in free-market capitalism will say this is an intended feature.

Have you never heard of "actions have consequences?"

You're probably not going to hear someone just outright say this is good but they will allude to it.

Deep down they know it's bad, hence why most won't just come and say homelessness is a good thing.

If they don't say it's good, and they know deep down it's not good, in what sense do they support it? Again, I'd be interested to read up on it if you have examples in mind, but every "free market capitalism" person I'm familiar with agrees it'd be great if everyone had electricity and nobody was homeless.

Every economic system ends up with both a carrot and a stick.

In some systems, there is the idea that people will take only what they need, and they will of course work hard for the common good. Once the reality of human nature makes it clear that this is a fantasy, out come the rifles and prison camps.

In other systems, the carrot and stick are just natural consequences of nobody intervening. If you don't work, that's fine... but you won't earn anything, and you thus won't be able to convince other people to provide you with things like electricity.

We can adjust the economic system to be more one way or the other. Pretending that the carrot and stick need not exist is a path to hyperinflation, which is a stick applied recklessly to everybody.

Seriously? You really think that the purpose of charging for electricity is to be mean to poor people?

Electricity is generated by enormous, complicated machines. Those machines cost money to build and maintain. They consume massive amounts of coal or natural gas, which has to be transported in. They have to pay specialists to keep everything running. They need to have people on call 24/7/365 to maintain thousands of miles of wires.

All of that costs money.

There's a simple rule: Everyone pays for the electricity they consume.

The electrical power industry is highly regulated by the government. Utilities have to provide power to all areas, they can't overcharge people too far above their costs, and they have to give plenty of notice before rate increases or disconnection for non-payment.

Hogwash. It would cost only $12B a year to pay for electricity for the poorest 10 million households. The defense budget was increased by 43B/year in 2018.

“Only” $12,000,000,000 / year.

What's more important? People having basic utilities or the latest killer drone?

Comparing costly new services to the national military budget is classic “whataboutism”. The military budget is a popular punching bag. It’s true, about 4% of the US GDP goes to the military. That 4% buys us — and our allies — nearly guaranteed deterrence from major armed conflict. And a lot of that spend goes right back into the economy.

Do you think giving people electricity and housing and education doesn't "go right back into the economy"?

You don't think usage would go up dramatically if electricity was free?

You could have a free tier per person.

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