TVA Could End with the Stroke of a Pen

After 90 years, many in the South likely don't think much about the possibility that TVA could end. But as a creature of Congress, TVA could end with the stroke of a pen.

This would occur should a consensus develop among American citizens and their elected representatives that TVA has too much unaccountable power over too many people in too many states and that this unconstrained power has produced the entirely predictable result that abuse of this power has become a feature of the organizational culture.

TVA’s end would mean selling its generating assets to a conventional energy organization like Duke Power, providing a significant windfall for the US Treasury, and returning its lands to the states who owned them for most of their histories.

What would it take for citizens to recognize that TVA has too much unaccountable power? This simple realization that it is one of the very few purely socialist entitites in the United States. Americans already know that uconstrained government power, reaching its peak under the socialist model, leads to economic dislocation and compromise of rights. They just haven't been exposed to the truth of TVA's socialist nature and how this has led to the abuses of power virtually inevitable under this model.

Real-live cases of TVA abuse of power are the perfect demonstration of how government ownership of the means of production leads, for example, to retaliation against those seeking help as a perverse and callous means of reducing future workload by imposing onerous punishments and private property takings that have no economic justification. A Duke Power would never think to demand capricious destruction of private property on private property, and local officials accountable to voters would be loath to do the same.