[red-beard]

Originally Posted by Superman

This will likely get moved to PARF, though there shouldn't really be a need.

James had said:

The government doesn't own the phone system! Or the electric utility. There are some cities where the city owns the electric utility, but this is not generally the case. Most of the time, water is municipal, but not in my area. We have a regulated, private company which supplies our water.

The government used to own those things. In fact the government and the taxpayers built those infrastructure systems that private companies were subsequently permitted to, basically, lease so they could rent space in those systems to their customers, the taxpayers who built the systems in the first place.

Correct, true government electric utilites and PUD's have been replaced by private companies. This is how it starts. The private utilities are heavily regulated, essentially required to operate much like the old PUD's, but they have stockholders. Their earnings are....regulated by the public, which is also how their service is also overseen. By the public. Usually in the form of a state utilities "commission." The next step is to permit multiple private "utility" companies, which are really just brokers, to buy and sell commodities like electric power, at a profit. This is where regulation stops. These "brokers" are not overseen by any commission.

One impact is that small development essentially stops. Nobody's going to build a house at the end of Rural Road because the the cost of bringing utilities out there will be prohibitive. The brokers will all be busy vying for the Reynolds Aluminum contract. Currently, regulated utilities are encouraged to participate in grid-expansion. Otherwise, they'd focus on kilowatt-packaging.

Final note......it's sad James, that you have a regulated water utility. Sad because that is the first step in this process. It's also good though, since the buying and selling and volume-packaging by brokers has not yet begun. When that happens, your water bill will not go down.

Once water is captured, I'm sure some folks will get to work on how to get control of the air supply. Now THAT will be a tremendous opportunity for earnings and profits. United Oxygen Brokers, Inc.

All I can say is no. Your history is flat wrong. AT&T was always a private company. It was never owned by any government. The "government" did not build, nor did it own the "infrastructure".

This was the case in many other countries, but not in the USA. Supe, where do you get this stuff?