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Show Editorial: SOCIALISM AND SHORTAGES England has completely socialized her electric 2ower industry, along with most other basic enterprise. enter-prise. According to Labor government spokesman, this would give the nation more and better power service. Just how well that goal has been realized can be judged from a little item the United Press carried a short time ago under a Glasgow, Scotland, dateline. It read: "The public address system failed Monday when Princess Elizabeth opened an exhibit designed to extol the growth of electric power throughout Britain. Embarrased technicians found that a 10 per cent power cut had been ordered in the district because be-cause there wasn't enough power to go around." This may be a rather exceptional coincidence, but it is symbolic of socialism. Government owned and operated business is wasteful and inefficient. It does-not does-not have to compete with other business. It isn't regulated. regu-lated. It's an air-tight monopoly in which the politicians politi-cians make all the decisions and in which patronage and political favoritism have dominant roles. . The bureaucrats are always talking about the possibility of power shortages in this country, and they use that as an argument in favor of more socialized social-ized power development at a cost of billions to the taxpayers. tax-payers. As a matter of fact, there has never been a power shortage in areas where the heavily-taxed, publicly-regulated private utilities have been free to go ahead and build up their plants and other facilities to meet prospective demand. We have come nearest to shortages in regions such as the Pacific Northwest where socialization and the threat of more socialization socializa-tion have blocked private power development on a major scale. During the next three years, the light and power industry will spend $6,000,000,000 to meet civilian and defense electric requirements of this nation. Its reserve capacity will be steadily increased. Every nickle of that money will be private capital. It will create great new taxable assets for all levels of government, gov-ernment, instead of destroying taxable assets as happens hap-pens when government goes into business, for public plants are tax-exempt. Socialism isn't needed here. |
