[wordhydrogen]

It’s an interesting thought experiment.

However there are lots of services which are in-fact inherent monopolies. Take electricity transmission or your ISP for example. They have a common set of infrastructure which is hard to share among many competing interests. Who gets to decide what should be upgraded, to what, and when? How does one divvy up costs infrastructure changes which did not benefit a significant set of participants because they are individually in the minority and unable to cooperate? If you prioritize minority participants then what about the majority participant? What about a super majority participant?

Lots of times cities will try to regulate these services tightly because past behavior has necessitated it. Though ISPs are perhaps a bad example here.

I read an article somewhere talking about a study where privatized healthcare resulted in increased profits but patient services suffered. Is profit above all else a good objective for government services?

[valty]

> inherent monopolies

I've learned to be careful about this "natural monopoly" term because it turns out to be very debatable. Recently with fiber deployments is a good example...see London/UK experience.

I feel like if people realized the benefits to having many companies compete for everything, then they would choose services that did not act like monopolies and to create barriers of entry.

The consumer ultimately dictates how companies should do business. The problem is a lot of the time they are choosing the price that is in front of them, and not considering the price in the future.

If consumers were smarter they could break monopolies without government intervention necessary.

Like if there were two companies building out some critical infra...if one promised they would do it in a way that others could compete easily, and consumers valued that, then they would win the contract.

> profit above all else a good objective for government services

This doesn't need to be the case.

People already work for government without profit incentive. It's personal prestige mostly I think.

Interesting to think about what would happen if we introduced duplication and competition within government departments. It seems extremely counter-intuitive because of duplication, but its how the entire capitalist sector deliver efficiencies. Same as how open source works. People compete for prestige.

Corporates sometimes do this too. Google might have multiple teams working on the same goal.

Interesting to think about what would happen if you hired two people to do one job and made them compete against each other on every task.

[wordhydrogen]

Interesting points.

I still think some services are more prone to being naturally competitive while others are more prone to being naturally centralized. Everything is on a spectrum. Good government regulation tries to balance these natural tendencies.

I’d be curious to hear more about your thoughts on “natural monopolies”. I’ll have to look up the fiber deployment as I am not familiar with that.

> If consumers were smarter they could break monopolies without government intervention necessary.

True but that is the nature of being human. We have evolved to use heuristics and biases due to fundamental time and energy budgets with bounded computational abilities. If one looks at the assumptions made in the efficient market hypothesis it’s pretty easy to see that many of those assumptions are simply not fully true. Though they are useful simplifications for modeling at times.

> Interesting to think about what would happen if you hired two people to do one job and made them compete against each other on every task.

Oh man I’d hate to think what office politics/drama would turn into. Still would be an interesting experiment.