> the generator would have been only used for your needs.
God forbid we live in a world where sharing and helping others is OK.
God forbid we live in a world where sharing and helping others is OK.
I think there are better ways of sharing and helping.
But the disadvantage of bureaucratic authoritarianism is even larger in a low-trust society where everyone is in it for themselves, because then you can't trust the bureaucrats not to be corrupt and they're still sitting on a monopoly.
Which is to say, what you always want is a high trust society and what you never want is a monopolist.
When you have a "natural monopoly" the thing you want to do is keep it as narrow as conceivably possible, i.e. the opposite of extending the monopoly on wires into authority over generation.
Moreover, the concept of a "natural monopoly" is painted across far more things than it actually applies to.
For example, suppose around half of the people on your street have a solar+battery system and the only reason any of you need a grid connection at all is in case it's cloudy for too many days in a row. Instead of you all paying a central power utility a lot of money, would it be economically feasible (in the absence of adversarial regulations) to run a second set of distribution lines down the existing utility poles or conduits and then install a single large generator that can take care of everyone on your street on those couple of days? Yeah, it pretty well would, and even if you didn't actually do it, the availability of that option would put competitive pressure on the incumbent. So they predictably work to make that economically infeasible through regulatory barriers using fraudulent "natural monopoly" arguments. You don't need an interstate power grid so that a dozen neighbors can share a backup generator.
And if something isn't actually feasible then you don't need to pass a law to ban it, right?
Even if you have a licensed electrician to do the work, they still make it an enormous ordeal to install new wires on utility poles. Case in point, what would it take for you to be able to install new fiber? There is no electricity even involved there.
Actually it very literally does.
In a high trust society people aren't trying to con you but they're still subject to structural constraints. When Alice has a good idea but Bob has a monopoly, Alice isn't allowed to implement it and Bob doesn't understand it because he's not smart enough to rather than because he's crooked. When a monopolist has a stable source of revenue their management is living in a world where money is available and they start thinking up ways to "help" by spending it, which raises costs even when it's well intentioned and then harms the poor who now have to pay a premium to receive a necessity.
In a high trust society people are not, generally, trying to con you whether or not they are subject to structural constraints.
The classic example is a large hierarchical organization where the line workers have knowledge of the process but no management competence and correspondingly don't know what information is even relevant to pass up the chain, and the top brass have management training but have been put in charge of so many people that they don't have the bandwidth to know what's actually happening on the ground.
My point is essentially that there are situations where a monopoly is the best system available especially if you can rely on those involved to act in good faith. For example, I think the government holding a monopoly on policing power is the best available system. Within that monopoly power can be delegated a whole manner of ways, but ultimately the public good of policing is distributed through a manner of sub-institutions all answerable to a single institution.
I think the real delta in our views is I see the values of the people within a system as of equal or more importance to the structure of the system itself. It seems to me that you reason about this topic in an almost purely abstract manner, attempting to posit a "perfect" system which could work no matter who was actually implementing it, and indeed would be the best no matter who was actually implementing it. I used to think this way, but came to the conclusion that it was impossible.
A society where everyone is thinking of the common good is the one where the bureaucracy's job isn't coercion, simply efficient management and organization. Authoritarianism is the problem with bureaucratic authoritarianism, not bureaucracy.
In a high trust society there would never be a need for more than one organization responsible for supplying the public with something like power or water. Centralizing those functions to a single organization would eliminate redundancies and inefficiencies reducing the costs necessary to provide the service. In a high trust society that single company's goal would only be to provide a quality service to the public, instead of demanding endlessly increasing personal enrichment at the expense of the public.
What happens in your non-authoritarian bureaucracy when the bureaucrats make a decision you believe to be in error and you set out to do something inconsistent with it?
If they're allowed to stop you then you can't demonstrate that their policy is in error by doing the opposite to show that it's better. Whereas if they can't stop you then they don't have a monopoly.
Someone doesn't have to be malicious in order to be imperfect. All it takes is for any one of the >300 million people who are all being inhibited from doing it to be better at it than the monopolist.
> Centralizing those functions to a single organization would eliminate redundancies and inefficiencies reducing the costs necessary to provide the service.
Doing that sort of thing suppresses diversity and breeds monoculture, which is how you get catastrophic systemic failures. When an honest mistake is made it applies not to 2% of your food supply but to 100% of it, which is Very Bad.
You follow the process to have the decision reviewed and you make your case. Even if they reject what you propose you're still able to try to convince others that your idea is better and, assuming that you have a democracy, you can have the rules changed.
> If they're allowed to stop you then you can't demonstrate that their policy is in error
I struggle to imagine a scenario where there's no possible way to determine if an error was made or if a change might be an improvement without just doing it anyway. If it isn't plainly obvious that your idea would be better and there are also no facts, research, examples, models, etc. that give support to your idea you should expect to have trouble convincing others of how great it is. When something only impacts you personally, you can blindly try things without any reason to think it might be better all you like, but people who are making decisions that impact large numbers of people, whole communities even, should require some kind of evidence before changing things for everyone. Ideally, there'd be a process in place so new solutions can be proposed, promising ideas can be explored, researched, trialed, tested, then implemented.
> Doing that sort of thing suppresses diversity and breeds monoculture, which is how you get catastrophic systemic failures.
Sometimes, but not always. What you'd call monoculture can be really great. It's why international standards and internet protocols exist and are followed. It promotes interoperability. It'd be a lot easier to write an app to help people keep tabs on their power usage and charges if there was just one company putting out bills and an API. Even with a single company providing a service they can still make good use of diversification to limit their risks. Companies with tons of competitors often take those kinds of precautions to avoid single points of failure within their operations. The last ISP I worked for had over 15 types of modems in the field from a variety of manufacturers. Some were being trialed, some were being phased out, but a firmware problem or failing component impacting one model wouldn't take down every customer. Companies tend to try to standardize where they can though.
There are certainly some trade offs involved with having one organization handling things, and it's not ideal for every type of service, but things like utilities are good candidates because of the scales involved and because the "product" being delivered is the same. When power companies are doing what's expected of them nobody has a preference for the electricity that Company A provides over what Company B delivers. I wouldn't want a single company making all the pizza though, because in that case variety matters.
If you have a good idea in a competitive market, your incentive to advocate for it is that if it succeeds you get market share. If a company has a billion dollars in costs and you can reduce them by 10%, that's worth a hundred million dollars, which is a huge incentive to do it when you get to put the hundred million dollars in your pocket, or capture a large fraction of a market whose net profit has a similar number of zeroes in it.
If you have the same idea but the incumbent monopolist doesn't listen to you, how many hours can you justify advocating for it? Your share of the efficiency as a customer is e.g. $50/year.
> I struggle to imagine a scenario where there's no possible way to determine if an error was made or if a change might be an improvement without just doing it anyway. If it isn't plainly obvious that your idea would be better and there are also no facts, research, examples, models, etc. that give support to your idea you should expect to have trouble convincing others of how great it is.
Models can't give you empirical evidence.
Suppose the monopolist has been doing something a particular way for 100 years. The equipment they use is expensive and lasts 30 years, as is the equipment you want to use instead. Their argument is that they want all their equipment to be uniform and don't want to be stuck with something experimental for the entire service lifetime, so they don't even want to invest in a small trial because if the benefits aren't large they'd either have to replace the trial equipment early or support two types of equipment for three decades. Your argument, which they reject, is that it's worth risking a moderate amount of capital to do a trial with 5% of the installed base.
If there is no monopoly then you risk your own time or money to do the small trial and reap the benefits if it works out. But with a monopolist who says no to the attempt, you can't show that your solution is better because they've declared that the cost of finding out isn't something they're willing to pay, and the option to take the risk onto yourself is taken away.
> It's why international standards and internet protocols exist and are followed. It promotes interoperability. It'd be a lot easier to write an app to help people keep tabs on their power usage and charges if there was just one company putting out bills and an API.
Except that those sort of things don't have anything enforcing the monopoly, and in many cases don't even have one. For example, gzip and lzma both have published formats but they essentially compete with each other, and that's good, because lzma has better compression ratios but gzip is faster and uses less memory. And the existence of either one doesn't prevent the introduction of zstd, which manages to get compression ratios competitive with lzma while still being pretty fast.
And having multiple algorithms doesn't impede interoperability because nobody is forced to use any particular one. A server can use zstd with newer clients that support it and gzip with older ones that don't. If you want to transfer a file you can use https, ftps or sftp. There is a published standard for the telnet protocol and nobody is prevented from replacing it with ssh.
> Even with a single company providing a service they can still make good use of diversification to limit their risks. Companies with tons of competitors often take those kinds of precautions to avoid single points of failure within their operations. The last ISP I worked for had over 15 types of modems in the field from a variety of manufacturers.
At which point you're abandoning the "benefits" of uniformity and scale and then why forego the benefits of a competitive market?
> When power companies are doing what's expected of them nobody has a preference for the electricity that Company A provides over what Company B delivers.
They may have no preference for who generates the electricity because electricity is a fungible commodity, but they certainly do have a preference for a company that can supply it more efficiently at a lower price, and many customers will also have preferences on things like green energy, redundancy/reliability vs. cost, the trade off between having a consistent bill vs. paying live rates that might be lower on average but higher in specific months, etc.
About the only time you have a product where every customer wants the same thing is when you have a product where there is only one customer, e.g. the US military. And those tend to be the things where having a single supplier is extremely bad, since you don't want the single point of failure.
Companies in the US have violated the public's trust so often and so brazenly that consumers are forced to treat them as adversarial. Companies insist that we live in a low trust society because they want to take advantage of us, and they aggressively oppose consumer protection laws and efforts to regulate them in ways that would allow us to have more trust.