[DemocracyFTW2]

Agreed.

> You lock the system into a permanent political funding battle

Which is the way that things are tending to evolve into in much of Europe because after decades of touting and mandating "private-public partnerships" and mandatory "open-market" policies, now communes and cities find it difficult or impossible to maintain their municipality-based and owned utilities, including gas, water, electricity and public transportation, because they get basically forced to sell to the lowest bidder. In electricity, that's frequently simply the biggest and baddest competitor like Vattenfall or RWE, replacing century-old locally-owned operators that have had very good track records across two world wars and generations of consumers, operators that never had ANY need of being replaced, except for neo-liberal demagogues and improved opportunities of syphoning off profits from the public into already rich private pockets. It's just stealing made legal.