Reps/Cons are Right. Except When They're Wrong.

I went out this morning apple- and pear-picking with my daughter and grandchildren.  My son-in-law is a sports writer, his beat is the New England Patriots, they had their first home game today, and that's where he was.

My daughter drove us to a town called Stow, about an hour from where she lives.  We drove through some magnificent towns, and we took a lot of back roads.  It was very common in some towns to see solar panels, in small or large arrays.  (My daughter told me her mother, who lives in a different part of Massachusetts, is getting 30 solar panels.  She wants to convert her home heating to electric, and not to have to pay for the heat.)

As I've said before, the deal in Massachusetts is very different from the deal in Florida.  In Massachusetts, you get credit for all the solar power you produce, and my daughter's electric bills are $0 every month.  And she gets a small check from the electric company.  I have more solar panels than do my daughter and son-in-law, I create more electricity than I use every day, FPL calculates that I somehow still owe them about $0.36 a day, and they charge me twice that.  They keep manipulating their minimum bill, so that at a certain level, the less you use. the more you pay.

Reps/cons claim to favor free enterprise and business, because business, according to them, results in progress and innovation.  One of the factors that fuels progress and innovation is competition.  And I certainly get it.  I can see how this makes complete sense.  You reward someone for their innovative efforts, and they'll come up with innovations.

So Dem/lib Massachusetts is a perfect example of supporting free enterprise and business, and rewarding progress and innovation.  But Rep/con Florida somehow is not.  Rep/con Florida, which should, according to its political theory, be leading the way to innovation, and welcoming competition, does exactly the opposite.  (Unless you count all the scams in Florida as examples of innovation.  Somehow, a lot of them come from Palm Beach County.)

Florida and its legislature, with the pressure they exert on the PSC, manage to punish innovation and competition, which is precisely the antithesis of what you would expect a red state to do.  But the method to this seeming madness is that red Rep/con Florida is more devoted to big businesses, like FPL, than it is to the actual, you know, people who live in Florida.  They'll sell us down the river in a heartbeat to keep a company like FPL awash in Floridians' money, so FPL won't have to modernize and innovate, which is just what Reps/cons say is the intended result of the Rep/con agenda.  It's not hard to understand, though, since legislators get more money, in campaign donations, from big companies like FPL than they do from the rest of us, or from their salaries.  So they know who are their real constituents, and we're not it.

But perhaps crazy and unexpected enough, this is not true in blue Dem/lib Massachusetts, which I'm sure plenty of red Reps/cons dismiss as "socialist."  But they're a lot more capitalist, in the purest sense of the word, than are the red Reps/cons in Florida.

Go figure.