This right here is a demonstration of the insanity of private ownership of public utilities.

As Pepco customers in the District and Maryland have contended with inaccurate outage maps, rising electricity bills, and long hours and days of waiting for their lights to come back on, Pepco Holdings investors have prospered. In the past year, they have reaped the benefits of surging revenue, a 12 percent increase in the stock price and a steady stream of dividends. Last year, Pepco Holdings paid more than $240 million in dividends.

Electrical utilities, of course, rightly have governmentally-protected monopolies – after all, it makes no sense to duplicate the electrical infrastructure, to say nothing of the potential engineering and other problems arising from multiple parallel power grids.

But the nature of for-profit companies is that they have every incentive to provide as little service as possible for as much cost as possible. And without any competition, Pepco has no incentive to provide its customers with any standard of service, or to lower its prices. It doesn’t serve us, the customers – its ultimate allegiance is to its shareholders.

Which is why things like electrical infrastructure shouldn’t be in the hands of for-profit companies. There shouldn’t be such a thing as a “shareholder” in the company that administers our electrical infrastructure.

Power generation, sure, make that for-profit – we should be able to choose who we buy the original power from, in order for those of us who want to support green energy to be able to vote with our pocketbooks, and we can have reasonable competition for generation because it’s relatively easy to hook up another power-generating station to the grid.

But the grid itself? That should be administered by the government or by a very heavily regulated private company whose profit margin – not just their prices or their service standards – is limited by government.

This is the tragedy of the commons, evidence of the last 3+ decades of corporate rule – that shareholders in the electric company profit from the plight of a captive customer base. Corporatist conservative philosophy has no solution for this kind of blatant profiteering off the backs of the general populace, because the entire philosophy is based in the notion that shareholders – not citizens – are the most important people in society.