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Comment by antonovka | Hacker News Reader

But we would never know as long as the government enforced the coercive monopoly.

This is a one-sided description and a false dichotomy. A non-regulated natural monopoly can be just as suppressive as a government enforced-coercive monopoly. A regulated natural monopoly does not also require the creation of a government-enforced coercive monopoly.

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Please provide an example of where this has ever been the case. That is, where a company without a government grant of exclusivity (or other sorts of government favoritism) in a market has been able to 1) sustain that monopoly for more than a few years, and 2) to leave their customers worse off than if the business had never existed in the first place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly#Historical_exa...

That example discusses a naturally competitive situation and how that wasn't apparently optimal. No one was worse off for the companies existing, and they weren't even monopolies, making it irrelevant to our discussion here. The example claims society was better off when the government established monopolies that could be profitable. The government could have done that at any time -- the existing private companies didn't provide any impediment to that. So that's all fine and good, but how does that answer my question? I'll let you have the last word.

Clearly you didn't read it closely enough. They were worse off for the lack of an affordable water supply leading to a lack of sanitation and epidemic.

The inefficient private solution stayed the adoption of a publicly administered one.

Does this break the record for most nested comments?

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