In the United States today, officials at all levels of government generally act as if private enterprise is the only way to provide goods and services. Yet a bastion of public ownership survives: more than a quarter of electricity customers—including the residents of Los Angeles, Omaha, San Antonio, Seattle, Jacksonville, and Tupelo, along with tens of millions of other people—get their power from one of the country’s more than 2,500 publicly owned utilities and rural electric cooperatives. Mostly established in the first half of the twentieth century, these institutions have a long record of offering reliable service at affordable rates; even today, publicly owned utilities charge less and resolve outages faster on average than their investor-owned counterparts. Creating more like them, however, has been extraordinarily difficult. Since the 1940s, few communities have successfully taken control of their private utilities; one such example is the city of Massena, New York, which waged a seven-year political and legal fight before taking over its power grid from Niagara Mohawk in 1981. Residents immediately saw their bills go down …