The Key West Citizen

FAITH IN AMERICA

Within the next few years the electric
industry plans to spend a total of four billion
dollars on a huge construction program. Every dollar of this astronomical
sum will be spent in local communities and
the plants and lines it builds will be loaded
with every form of taxation the companies
can think up. State and Federal regulatory
agencies will be alert to see that
electric consumers are given the best possible service at the lowest possible rates.

There will be no running of the local citizenry to Washington, D. C., for funds to
complete half-finished projects. The power
will be coming from business enterprises
that will pay taxes right along with the
grocery store, the newspaper, the bank
and other local enterprise.

Those areas where socialized power
is in full flower cannot look forward to
enjoying their normal share of this expansion program. Taxpaying industry cannot compete with tax-exempt, unregulated,
politically-managed projects. Probably a
good part of the four billion dollars which
the electric utilities plan to spend will be
spent to forestall a future power shortage
in sections of the country which still have
confidence in the privately owned electric
company. They are planning years ahead
-something political projects will never
do. As the people who depend upon gov-
ernment power dams have found to their
sorrow, appropriations from Congress are
a precarious foundation on which to build
any plans because politics is always the
motivating influence, not real good or responsibility.

It is indeed encouraging to find an industry that has been badgered for more
than a decade by deliberate efforts of powerful political groups to put the government into the power business, still with
sufficient stamina and faith in America to
launch a four billion dollar program of
construction. It will be a sad day for our
country if the socialists should ever succeed in killing such initiative in private
citizens in favor of the unimaginative
stop-gap fumblings that characterize the
bureaucrat in business.

Thinking is very
important, but no
work was ever accomplished by thinking
alone.

The number of people in a community
is not as important as the kind of people
who live there.