Ask HN: Why don't we turn government into a subscription service?

In practice it leads to underfunding of public schools because the people with money are the people with political power. If their kids went to purely taxpayer-funded schools they would be higher quality and everyone would be getting a better education. (I know in the US things are a bit different, and there are are high quality public schools).

The argument then has two sides. One side is the freedom argument: parents should be able to do what they want within reasonable bounds. Seems valid and clear-cut. But then the other side points to the long-term consequences of having a bad education system. Lower economic growth, more populism if you have a stupid population with poor media literacy skills, and all the associated unpredictable unintended consequences that don't fit nicely into the whole "freedom" discussion. What was that freedom worth if I now have to live in a dictatorship because of all the accumulated unintended side effects that boiled over?

In practice it leads to underfunding of public schools because the people with money are the people with political power. If their kids went to purely taxpayer-funded schools they would be higher quality and everyone would be getting a better education. (I know in the US things are a bit different, and there are are high quality public schools)."

The threat of students leaving for private school and reducing funding for public schools (since their funding is based partly on enrollment) likely causes public schools to be better than if there were no alternative.

I've learned to be careful about this "natural monopoly" term because it turns out to be very debatable. Recently with fiber deployments is a good example...see London/UK experience.

I feel like if people realized the benefits to having many companies compete for everything, then they would choose services that did not act like monopolies and to create barriers of entry.

The consumer ultimately dictates how companies should do business. The problem is a lot of the time they are choosing the price that is in front of them, and not considering the price in the future.

If consumers were smarter they could break monopolies without government intervention necessary.

Like if there were two companies building out some critical infra...if one promised they would do it in a way that others could compete easily, and consumers valued that, then they would win the contract.

> profit above all else a good objective for government services

This doesn't need to be the case.

People already work for government without profit incentive. It's personal prestige mostly I think.

Interesting to think about what would happen if we introduced duplication and competition within government departments. It seems extremely counter-intuitive because of duplication, but its how the entire capitalist sector deliver efficiencies. Same as how open source works. People compete for prestige.

Corporates sometimes do this too. Google might have multiple teams working on the same goal.

Interesting to think about what would happen if you hired two people to do one job and made them compete against each other on every task.

The thing is...a sector of companies that do this is probably a good business opportunity that is being crowded out by a mandatory government monopoly.

The fact that government does this means that you are already paying for it, and maybe its not being done well.

If people care about their food, they should look for a sticker on their food, from an organization that verifies it. If other people don't have the label, and people know about it, then people won't buy from them.

And if this is too much trouble, then have another industry above this where companies offer all-encompassing ratings on a variety of different things.

With modern technology so much is possible to solve problems that otherwise were too complicated.

You could end up with a marketplace of super apps, that ensure you are completely covered across all avenues of life to the parameters that you desire.

It sounds complicated, but today its even more complicated with government where we rely on the media mostly.

To find out what a true free market of healthcare looks like.

Often you find that government intervention distorts markets.

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...and this looks like the case.

For example, people complain that benefits are tied to employers. But this was caused by the government capping wage increases to combat inflation in 1942, which resulted in companies offering pre-tax health benefits.

This looks like it is changing as people are like: wtf this makes no sense and creates so many bad incentives.

It looks like market forces will fix the system in the end, maybe it just takes 50 years or so.