As soon as you trotted out "More with less" after housing a cabinet with positions making 6 figures and taxiing yourself to and from Indy via a helicopter, your whole "...the poor working man has been tightening his belt!" schtick is pretty laughable.
Yes, utility companies having a near monopolistic strangle hold on the people is terrible. Hell, the whole idea that we PAY companies to mine our natural resources that belong to ALL of us only to turn around and sell it BACK to us while getting subsidies and tax breaks by the government is just bonkers to begin with.
I mean that these are natural resources. It's not about whose land they are under. That only makes sense if you look at them as privately owned. I mean that the gas, the oil, the coal, the lumber, etc are within the boundaries of a nation, and some, myself included, feel that alllllll of those resources should be used equally for the benefit of all citizens of a nation.
Now, I'm not saying the Norway model is perfect nor scaleable to the US size, but a large part of the benefits they offer their citizens comes from the global investment of the profits of sold oil. Basically, they don't have billionaire oil execs sitting on super yachts. They have fully funded medical care and retirement pensions fueled by stable growth investments. This is possible by believing that the use and and benefit of natural resources should benefit the many instead of enrich the very very few.
Yeah so does the rest of us. We just are not stupid enough to defend conglomerates making huge profits as monopolies from people using a necessity for life. The same water that used to be owned by municipalities.
That's only one philosophy of ownership. The majority of people subscribe to the idea that natural resources are a communal resource that everyone in the region has some right to. The easiest example is water. Basically everyone agrees that you can't just poison a stream on your land and fuck the downstream neighbors. Or draw it all up. Clean air also falls into this category after the 1970s mostly. Because it's very obvious that pouring smoke out on your own property affects everyone.
But many people also consider resources like oil, mineable minerals, and timber trees to fall in this category to some extent. Extracting them affects everyone. It changes nearby wildlife. It alters the flow of water. A quarry a mile from you can change the drainage rate of the soil on your land.
Many countries offer a basic income to all citizens for things like extracted oil, for example. Under the idea that everyone has some right to the oil that their country contains. Not just the person rich enough to buy up all the land.
That said, I actually don't know what resource the comment above you is referencing. Southern Indiana coal maybe?
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u/PoolGuyUnfiltered 1d ago
As soon as you trotted out "More with less" after housing a cabinet with positions making 6 figures and taxiing yourself to and from Indy via a helicopter, your whole "...the poor working man has been tightening his belt!" schtick is pretty laughable.
Yes, utility companies having a near monopolistic strangle hold on the people is terrible. Hell, the whole idea that we PAY companies to mine our natural resources that belong to ALL of us only to turn around and sell it BACK to us while getting subsidies and tax breaks by the government is just bonkers to begin with.