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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

Ok, so my statement that a monopoly corporation is a useless middleman and the we're better off if the government does it because at least they're one fewer link in the chain is negated by neither being very good, so we do nothing.

And we wonder why shit sucks in this country.

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The government and large corporations are parts of the same machine. The corporations fund the campaigns of the elected government officials and in turn, they pass legislation favorable to the corporations. The legislation is often written by the lawyers of those very corporations. Further, the bureaucrats who head the government agencies responsible for regulating the corporations are often hired by those very corporations after their tenure.

The only way out is to vote out the incumbent every election until we get the government we want. If and when we actually start doing this, it will probably take at least a generation because so many people are largely ok with it, or too busy surviving to pay attention.

Sorry to paint such an unpleasant picture, but it's what it is. I'm optimistic because people are starting to wake up to it quite a bit.

None of which invalidates my original statement that the situation in which a monopoly corporation controls a utility is strictly worse than the government controlling it directly because at least there is one less layer of indirection.

Can you give some examples where this is the case?

....it doesn't require examples, it is simple logic.

I assert that:

1) A monopoly can only be held accountable by the government.

2) The government can only be held accountable by the people.

Therefore, if the people wish to hold the operators of a utility accountable then having a monopoly control that utility is only introducing an extra, unnecessary, layer.

As far as I can tell, you make no claim that contradicts 1 or 2. You are, at best, saying that in practice having a monopoly run things is no worse than having the government do it directly. Feel free to correct my assessment.

So your argument would be stronger if you cited examples. I assume since you aren't you're arguing from a strictly theoretical / academic sense. If we're going to go that route:

  1) A monopoly can only be held accountable by the government.

This is not true. A monopoly can also be held accountable by the shareholders. A monopoly can also be held accountable by the market. Ask any cable company, for example. A monopoly can also be held accountable by new entrants to the market, ask any ISP that refuses to run lines to rural areas.

  2) The government can only be held accountable by the people.

From a strictly academic sense, this is true, but requires an election to achieve, and I've already gone over how those are captured by the very corporations governments are supposed to hold accountable. 88% of the population supports medical marijuana legalization, but it's still illegal at the federal level. Where's the government accountability there?

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/11/22/americans-o...

> This is not true. A monopoly can also be held accountable by the shareholders. A monopoly can also be held accountable by the market. Ask any cable company, for example.

The monopolies in question are utility monopolies, none of these apply except the shareholder control, the holding accountable of which is equivalent to holding the company itself accountable.

> A monopoly can also be held accountable by new entrants to the market, ask any ISP that refuses to run lines to rural areas.

Considering the state of rural internet access in the US, that doesn't seem to be supporting your argument at all. And when ISPs have local monopolies their service is measurably much more expensive and worse than when there is competition, and also measurably worse that municipally run connectivity, which they fight tooth and nail.

> From a strictly academic sense, this is true, but requires an election to achieve, and I've already gone over how those are captured by the very corporations governments are supposed to hold accountable.

As I said, even given this the situation with the government alone running things is only as bad as it is with the monopoly middleman while remaining potentially easier to change.

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