What an idea!

I was reading the paper at lunch today and one of the letters to the editor struck my fancy. The writer was commenting on the fact that the phone company, the cable provider and the electric power company were not being very responsive. For instance, after fixing a bad land line, the phone company ignored followup calls to bury the line so it wouldn't be damaged again. Also, the power company was going to be spraying herbicides along its lines in spite of requests not to do it (because it damaged neighboring vegetation). I know from personal experience that the cable company keeps raising rates while taking channels away. What can you do? Well, we're told that if the company won't cooperate, we can stop buying their product. But what if you need that product? What if there is no alternative? What if the only alternative (in the case of cable TV or phone service) is to switch to the other company which is just as bad? The companies, of course, try to please their customers and if you leave them, they will suffer.

That's not really true. Companies will only suffer if enough of the their customers leave or complain. If it's just a few of us, they can just ignore us. So, the letter writer ends with this (I've edited out a couple of things):

"Unfortunately, [these companies] have become too powerful, so powerful they have forgotten customers are supposed to come first. As an individual, I can't do much to change the way these companies behave, but [...] , if ordinary people like us unite, we have power."

What a great idea. We could all get together and make the companies acknowledge our requests. We couldn't all go there, like a mob, so we could get together and select people to talk for us. Maybe we could have a vote to select those people. Maybe, since things like this continue to happen, we could select the people to do this for a few years at a time. Maybe, since it will be time consuming to get all the facts straight and define reasoned arguments, the people we select should be paid. We could all chip in a little money and if enough of us do it, these people we select could afford to do this full time - like the companies we are dealing with. Let's come up with a name for it. Let's call it a government.

I don't know. The letter writer was probably being subtle. The letter writer probably assumed we would all recognize what he was describing. But when a non-subtle person like me reads the letter, he just can't help making a non-subtle blog posting about it.