There must be some middle ground that works.
In the 50s or so the infrastructure was created, including power plants etc, it was a profitable venture for the government, so they borrowed against the profits of the energy company, then failed upgrade/update any infrastructure. Add to to that the retirement pensions of all the people which they did not fund and it creates a big problem.
So now as it stands the energy company is in debt ( technically the government owes the energy company money but the government is insolvent ) and they are trying to sell it to a private entity.
Also if you are wondering why anyone would want to get a private pension plan instead of a 401k, well you werent allowed to put your money in a 401k ( same thing happened to the teachers by the way ). It actually very sadto hear the stories of people that worked theur whole life and have nothing to show for it due to the greed of politicians.
> in Norway (...) I could shop around for the best power company
> there shouldn't be a profit motive attached to basic services like electricity
(Like most hospitals in the US, by the way, coming back to the original "There shouldn't be a profit motive attached to basic services like electricity, policing (private prisons), or medicine" comment.)
The 501(c)(3) are the charitable ones, by the way.
"The more generous limit of non-exempt activity permissible to a 501(c)(4) explains why a 501(c)(4) organization may engage in substantial amounts of political campaign intervention activities even though the regulations make clear that such activities do not constitute the promotion of social welfare."
It's less pedantic and more: you can call a fork a spoon all you want, until you have to eat soup with it.
Edit: or maybe you were referring to hospitals? In that case you may be right and I was using the term loosely when I said “most”. There are different kinds of hospitals. My later comments were about ERCOT, not hospitals.
501(c)(3)s are charitable organizations, so “as a charitable organization” was also wrong. But 501(c)(3)s are a subset of 501(c) and thus are also nonprofits, so your implication that they could be a registered charitable organization but not a nonprofit was also wrong.
As a 501(c)(4) they are a nonprofit and not a charitable org; if they were a 501(c)(3) they would be both.
That's impossible in the US; “charitable organizations”—501(c)(3)—are a subset of nonprofits—501(c).
It's the same for the grid in Sweden (Svenska kraftnät), also how optic fiber is deployed here in Stockholm, the costly infrastructure was developed and is maintained by the government, private ISPs can lease out capacity but aren't the ones maintaining it. That avoided the costly deployment of multiple similar infrastructure per provider like you see in the US, where corporations cornered some markets and made the barrier of entry so costly that they became de facto monopolies.
> there shouldn't be a profit motive attached to basic services like electricity
Assuming people are corrupt and greedy and then working backwards from that point imho is the best approach, and that often times means giving people less control over our lives.
If, say, every county it serves owns a share of the company, you set up a structure in which it isn't supposed to generate a profit: shareholders can't run it into the ground for monetary reasons. On the other hand, being independent from the government itself makes it less vulnerable to corruption and harmful interference.
The failures of what the US calls "regulation" is shown by California (where decades of under-investing in both modernization and upkeep has led to countless deadly fires) and the Texas clusterf..k.
In the almost 30 years I've lived in Germany and a bit of Croatia, the only time I can remember I lost power without actively causing it myself by careless drilling was the Nov 2006 europe-wide blackout.