What people are saying is that it seems reasonable to ensure residents of a cold place like Calgary have access to heating, lighting, cooked food, and laundry.
It seems reasonable for the limit to be put there, but not lower? I think the article makes it pretty clear it's too low, or there's no credit system, or whatever.
My comment explicitly acknowledges that a sentence later.
>What people are saying is that it seems reasonable to ensure residents of a cold place like Calgary have access to heating, lighting, cooked food, and laundry.
>It seems reasonable for the limit to be put there, but not lower? I think the article makes it pretty clear it's too low, or there's no credit system, or whatever.
The limit of 1800W seems enough to get basic levels of "heating, lighting, cooked food, and laundry" done. The appliances that don't work at all (from the article: "dishwasher, dryer, oven or stove") don't seem essential. You can still wash dishes by hand, hang your clothes, and use a crock pot. It sucks not having access to those appliances, but those don't seem like unreasonable punishments for not paying your bills.
> Okay, let's make it so you get a certain amount of electricity for free, and if you exceed that you get cut off unless you pay. Oh wait...
But, to maybe return to good faith land, you write:
> ...but those don't seem like unreasonable punishments for not paying your bills
I'm not sure what "punishment" is supposed to do here. I'm skeptical that there's a significant cohort who have the means to pay their electric bill, but are holding out anyway. I think it's way more likely that these are families who've fallen on hard times, and these "punishments" are making their lives even more difficult.
You can also see this kind of policy spiraling right? Like it becomes a contest as to who can punish the debtor the most. Will it be the electric company? Public transit? Hospitals? Water/Sewage/Trash? Internet? If a family has $100 and their bills are $200, the entity with the sharpest punishment probably wins?
This is the kind of stuff that leads to people deciding between medicine or food, which is all in all I think bad for society. If the problem were insufficient punishment/consequences, I guess I wouldn't know how to explain the even worse outcomes in more punitive systems, say in poorer countries. For example, you would think people would see that their health outcomes decrease without medicine, so they would stop being lazy and get medicine. But a lot of people try to stop being lazy and die anyway, suggesting that the problem is more systemic than a widespread individual lack of ambition.
The punishment here is for the 95% (or whatever) of people who can afford it, to pay up. If not paying your electricity bill is not punishable by anything, I doubt many would bother paying, even if it's within their means. The fact that there isn't a "significant cohort who have the means to pay their electric bill, but are holding out anyway" is precisely because the threat of punishment is enough into get them to pay. I can't imagine the opposite to be true (ie. the electricity company operates on a "suggested donation" model and most people paying what they're asked to pay).
>I think it's way more likely that these are families who've fallen on hard times, and these "punishments" are making their lives even more difficult.
Right, the threat of electricity getting cut off/limited is enough that people would rather pay the bill than to hold out and save $50/month or whatever in their bank account. I agree it's a tragedy that "families who've fallen on hard times" are being punished even though they lack the means to pay, but unfortunately it's also non-trivial to discriminate between "people who have the means to pay but don't want to pay" and "people who don't have the means to pay but can't pay". That's also what's preventing a "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" economy from working properly, and why we have a market based economy instead.
>You can also see this kind of policy spiraling right? Like it becomes a contest as to who can punish the debtor the most. Will it be the electric company? Public transit? Hospitals? Water/Sewage/Trash? Internet? If a family has $100 and their bills are $200, the entity with the sharpest punishment probably wins?
1. But in this case the policy seems to be specifically designed to be not "sharp"? There's enough electricity to run the furnace. You can't run the stove, but that doesn't really stop you from making a healthy meal with affordable ingredients with a slow cooker.
2. maybe the entity with the sharpest punishment wins, maybe it forces the person to tighten their belts and drop the least essential services
I'm willing to accept quite a lot of inefficiency and misuse of a system like this if it means that everyone has a warm home.