Which they likely do anyway, if the regulating commission allows it.

How is it fair to require involuntary servitude on the part of paying customers to pay for what they did not use?

Those who are actually concerned should pay the bill if it is important to them. Pushing the bill onto others while expressing concern is not real concern. Forcing one person to pay for what another person needs is involuntary servitude (slavery).

It is not slavery. That is a silly exaggeration.

People who have more should pay more so those who barely scrape by (and are looking after the next generation - this is a family) can survive and thrive.

That is not slavery.

I am a little bemused to be writing this.

So, it is OK to take money and other goods from people who have it and bestow it on other people who don't?

If you're so concerned, then take the money out of your own pocket and use it to alleviate this problem. Dipping into someone else's pocket because you feel bad is not good behavior. It's theft.

And, its involuntary servitude because the person you are taking this money from worked for it. Do you think they worked for it to benefit you? To benefit this person you are so concerned about? No.

To the extent you are forcing them to work for your whims, to the direct benefit of someone else, to that extent they are made a slave.

Its just business. Companies pass losses onto other customers. Who do you think pays the medical bills for all those can't pay? Who pays for the public transportation, certainly not the riders. I would love to only pay for stuff I benefit from but I'm not naive. World doesn't work that way.

> So, it is OK to take money and other goods from people who have it and bestow it on other people who don't?

Yes

> It is not slavery. That is a silly exaggeration.

I blame the gradual watering down of the word "slavery" from "actual slavery" to "any economic arrangement that is unfair".

You are begging the question. If you start with the assumption that distribution must be organised solely by monetary exchange then of course any kind of collectivisation is going to appear as “theft” or “slavery”. However, there is no a priori reason to make that assumption, it is just a convenient one for certain interest groups.

Your assertion that distributing costs among many customers is a form of slavery seems really disconnected from actual slavery.

Many times, businesses pass costs onto customers for things they don’t use. My college charged me a “sports fee” for games I never went to. My health insurance will charge me my premiums when I don’t get sick. I will share the cost of peaker plants even if I don’t use electricity during peak hours.

If the utility covered some of these costs, people who didn’t like the resulting rate hike could buy solar panels or a generator.

In contrast, the word “slavery” refers to a practice where someone is kidnapped and forced to perform actions (labor, sex acts, etc.), often under the threat of having “the shit beat out of them,” to use a colloquialism.

This is not passing along a cost. It is taking money out of one person's pocket and directly benefiting another person who has not paid.

This is a lot different than paying the amortized/allocated cost of utility and all that is needed to run the utility. Paying people's bills for them when they do not pay is not necessary to run the utility. It generates no utility (in this case, electricity). A peaker plant generates utility, and it has associated costs.

Businesses often pass on the costs of dealing with people who don't pay because it is efficient, not because it is right.