Who Asked You? Some Questions Of Importance To Every American

Who asked you to pay for electricity used by people you never even heard of, a hundred or a thousand miles away?

Nobody! But you do help to pay the bills for hundreds of thousands of favored people and hundreds of privileged businesses using electricity from certain federal power systems. Your taxes helped build those systems. Your taxes are used to subsidize service to their customers.

Who asked you to foot the bill so this country could have socialized electricity?

Nobody! Yet, there are 72 federally owned power systems already in operation, under construction, or authorized at a total cost of over 10 billion dollars-- and hundreds more are planned at a total cost of about 60 billion dollars. That's your money that's financing socialism!

Who asked you for permission to keep on building expensive socialistic power systems when every tax dollar and every pound of critical material is needed for defense?

Nobody! But the backers of socialized power are planning to use more of your tax money to build costly electric lines that actually duplicate facilities of business-managed companies! Why? To put the government further into useless and killing competition with business-managed companies.

Who asked you whether you have enough electric power or not?

Nobody! The "planners" who favor socialized electricity speak vaguely of a "power shortage." Yet, the business-managed companies have more than doubled this nation's power supply since Pearl Harbor. And they've got a lot more coming!

pamphlet from Potomac Edison System, 1951