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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

A high trust society doesn't cause a monopoly to become efficient. A society where everyone is thinking of the common good is the one where individualism works, because then you have no need for a giant bureaucracy trying to coerce everyone into doing the right thing, since they would do that of their own accord.

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.

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> A society where everyone is thinking of the common good is the one where individualism works, because then you have no need for a giant bureaucracy trying to coerce everyone into doing the right thing

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.

> 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.

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.

Unless you are completely off the grid, you are getting power from a local monopoly. This is baked in. You get your water from one source, send your sewerage to one source, get your power from one source, etc. So then the question is how to make the monopoly well behaved and how to keep them that way.

> Unless you are completely off the grid, you are getting power from a local monopoly. This is baked in.

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?

"A high trust society doesn't cause a monopoly to become efficient."

Actually it very literally does.

It entirely doesn't.

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.

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