Imagine vast swaths of the countryside plunged into darkness. Not due to cataclysmic storms. Not at the hands of cybercriminals. Just because of nightfall. Imagine near-total darkness enveloping much of the nation’s landmass, simply because the sun sets.
That would be our reality to this day if not for a massive government intervention nearly a century ago. As recently as the early 1930s, the vast majority of homes in rural America had no electric lighting. Families used kerosene lanterns in their houses and outbuildings. That began to change when President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Administration by executive order in 1935. Congress soon jumped on the bandwagon, passing the Rural Electrification Act of 1936.
Without this collective action of the American people, executed by their national government, many of the most remote parts of our country would still be in the dark. Electric utilities never would have taken it upon themselves to go to the enormous expense of stringing thousands of miles of power lines across vast plains, over mountain passes and down back roads to accommodate a few extra paying customers.
The Rural Electrification Administration was abolished 30 years ago. Its work was done. Electricity had been brought to every nook and cranny of the United States.
Reflecting on the REA’s monumental achievement, one can only wonder whether the Herculean task of electrifying the entirety of America would’ve been undertaken at all if today’s attitudes towards government had permeated the population back then. It’s a safe bet that if lighting rural America had been left to the anti-government, taxation-is-theft crowd of modern times, countless families and communities would be without electricity still.
Public attitudes are currently such that it is widely assumed that pretty much every American hates paying taxes. Vanessa Williamson is a lonely scholar who disputes this conventional wisdom. Her research has led her to conclude that most Americans actually view taxpaying as a civic responsibility and a moral obligation. The Internal Revenue Service’s own taxpayer attitude surveys support Williamson’s theory, with 94% of Americans expressing a belief that it’s their civic duty to pay their fair share of taxes.
Williamson has one caveat, finding the thing that irks people about taxes is those who shirk their duty and find ways to avoid paying their fair share. Political economist Margaret Levi agrees, identifying a widespread willingness on the part of most Americans to fulfill their civic responsibilities if they think others are also doing their part—what she calls “ethical reciprocity.” But any sense that others aren’t pulling their weight makes us look to start free-riding ourselves.
Our country has a lengthy and growing to-do list, many wrongs to right. The rural hospital crisis. The climate crisis. The housing crisis. And so many other urgent challenges. The private sector will not—and cannot—solve these problems alone. The REA needs to be remembered because it needs to be replicated and applied to today’s forms of darkness.
To right today’s wrongs, government can and should be put to use the way it was when the whole country was electrified. Doing so depends on keeping in mind what Williamson, Levi and the IRS itself have learned: It all hinges on tax fairness.
It’s got to be all for one and one for all.
An energy entrepreneur left the following comment about this post on another social media platform: "The market failure (lack of private investment in rural infrastructure) that the rural electrification act solved, has been replicated with Broadband and will be again with EV charging. The problem is that instead of using what we learned in the REA (employing the cooperative model) our government funneled dollars into private companies who sought to maximize profits. This neoliberal model produces the worst of both worlds; the most expensive/ worst service when compared to other industrialized nations." Wanted to share this here.