This thread shows the difference between a high and low trust society.
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.
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?
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.
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.