She told me she was a socialist.
“She” is the stripper who feigned interest in politics and finance in an effort to get a closer look at the inside of my wallet.
But I wasn’t having it.
No, this night wasn’t for me, but instead for a friend of mine who’s about to get married…
It was your typical bachelor party setting, fully-stocked with obligatory raunchiness and the kind of smack-talking you can only retrieve from the vaults on rare occasions.
The Gentleman’s Club was appropriately staffed with girls that went by the names Tori, Jasmine, and Honey, and the bottles of Belvedere vodka went for $165 — the cheapest in the place, but a bottle guarantees a purple velvet booth behind a red velvet rope.
Now, I’ve never really been a fan of strip clubs. The whole idea of walking into a place where you know the whole point is to get hustled never really made much sense to me. Not that I have a problem with strip clubs. After all, those girls have to make a living, too. And who am I judge, anyway?
Heck, even the stripper who told me she was a socialist didn’t really move me much. And typically, I just would’ve forgotten her admission of foolishness in less than five minutes.
But it was her criticisms of capitalism that gave me the inappropriate compulsion to call her out…
You see, this was your typical, “Oh, if the world wasn’t so focused on making money, then maybe the world would be a better place” routine (ironically coming from a 23-year-old stripper who probably pulls in about $500 to $600 a night) — which begs the question: If “making money” is such a bad thing, then why isn’t she charging 20 puppy dog smiles for a lap dance instead of $20?
Nevertheless, the whole argument that somehow capitalism is the root of all the world’s evils is just a load of crap.
Tell that to any immigrant who escaped a communist country and see what happens. You’ll get a history lesson that’ll make your stomach hurt.
The truth is it’s because of capitalism that so many folks can escape the jaws of tyranny and poverty and build a life in “a better place.”
Where Freedom and Capitalism Flourish
If you’re reading this now, chances are you have access to electricity 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is a luxury that many of us take for granted, and it’s a luxury that has been afforded to us by the basic fundamentals of capitalism.
Plain and simple, where freedom and capitalism flourish, easy access to electricity can be found.
But for 1.2 billion people in emerging economies where capitalism and freedom are relatively new concepts, there is zero access to electricity.
However, thanks to forward-thinking, free-market approaches, the scourge of energy poverty could be nearly eliminated over the next 30 years.
I’ll explain how in just a minute, but first, read this quote from Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy Professor Rachel Kyte. I think it speaks volumes about what lack of electricity and modern energy technologies means to more than a billion people who don’t have it.
Access to energy is absolutely fundamental in the struggle against poverty. It is energy that lights the lamp that lets you do your homework, that keeps the heat on in a hospital, that lights the small businesses where most people work. Without energy, there is no economic growth, there is no dynamism, and there is no opportunity.
Capitalism is one of the greatest catalysts for positive change. I fully believe this, and history provides a long trail of evidence to substantiate this claim.
And just like so many crises we’ve overcome in the past, the crisis of energy poverty will also be solved through various free market mechanisms.
Pay-as-you-go
In an effort to provide electricity to energy-poor folks in India, a small tech company called Simpa Networks has developed an interesting pay-as-you-go-styled model for electricity.
As company reps explain, customers make a small initial down payment for a solar power system and then prepay for the service, topping up their systems in small, user-defined increments using a mobile phone.
Each payment also adds up towards a final purchase price. Once paid in full, the system unlocks permanently. Simpa Networks calls the pricing model Progressive Purchase™.
Similar pay-as-you go programs are currently being tested and utilized in India, Brazil, and a few energy-starved African countries, like Botswana, Namibia, and Mozambique.
For many of these communities, solar seems to be the power source of choice, as it doesn’t require centralized transmission (which does not exist in most energy-poor areas).
And interestingly, thus far, the pay-as-you-go model is proving to be quite successful not only for consumers, but for the companies backing these programs. Some analysts actually believe prepaid electricity could be the next step in the evolution of electricity services here in the United States.
Building on an earlier report about Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) launching a new service that allowed customers to prepay their utility for their electricity, energy analyst Katherine Tweed recently chimed in on prepaid electricity, writing:
For utilities, the drive is to decrease the amount of money that is lost to uncollectible bills. AT&T’s survey found that utilities send disconnect notices to nearly 10 percent of all residential customers each month, with about 3 percent to 5 percent of those actually being disconnected.
AT&T estimated that a utility with 250,000 customers and a 10 percent penetration rate of prepay would save between $5 million and $15 million per year. Another advantage is that customers on prepay use about 11 percent less electricity per month, a meaningful rate of savings for utilities looking to meet energy efficiency resource standards.
And of course, as inflation continues to put the smackdown on our purchasing power, a prepaid option could serve as a desirable and necessary option for a lot of folks still trying to make ends meet.
And by a lot of folks, I mean most of today’s struggling middle class.
Look, I’m not saying we’re all going to go to prepaid plans next year, but certainly such an option can benefit both consumers and utilities…
An option, by the way, that was initially spawned by a free-market approach to solving a very real problem.
To a new way of life and a new generation of wealth…
Jeff Siegel
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Jeff is the founder and managing editor of Green Chip Stocks. For more on Jeff, go to his editor’s page.
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