Just had a thought. It's a long one so bear with me...

Public goods generally cannot be wholly controlled by a single private company. If people attempt to surrender control of the public good to a single private company attempting to enforce a monopoly on it, the public good will be neglected, other options will still remain on the market (and those able to understand this catastrophe and the existemce of alternatives will patronize them), and the private entity entrusted with sole control over the good will use the inadequacies of its own handiwork as a pretense to get more funding to attempt to "solve the crisis" that it either still believes it can solve or still tries to convince other fools that it can solve.

Government, as I hope is obvious, is the premier private entity whose whole business model is monopoly and promising more than it can achieve, and is predicated on exactly this dynamic.

A pet theory of mine about natural monopoly that I've been developing:

The information and feedback mechanisms necessary to properly manage a resource, if they cannot fit into one mind or one private decision making unit, indicate that the resource cannot be a natural monopoly.

A natural monopoly can only occur in matters such as an owner over its private property, where the economic actor who owns the monopoly has, exclusively, the complete information necessary to direct the resource (property) to its most economical/ethical/important uses. If there is such a thing as authority, this theoretical limit is the boundary of its exclusive domain.

A customer at the grocery store who buys an orange now has sole control of that orange, knows its location in his car and later at home, knows where the guns are in his house for defending his property, knows what he needs the orange for, etc. He knows very little about all the other oranges at the store, which are a different resource, and even less about all the oranges in existence, which the store does not have the knowledge to control either. It would be impossible for this store or this customer to control all oranges. Voting doesn't magically transfer the knowledge either. Each actor controls its resource, but the public good of oranges is not wholly controlled by anyone. #Bitcoin is the same exact way, a public good with a distrubuted and immutable ledger, incentive framework, and verification system that no single private entity controls. Property rights under nature work this way. It is the way the world is. We are actually living in anarchy right now, but most people, even anarchists are deluded into thinking we are not. The government is merely a criminal that results in tremendous opportunity costs versus the alternative of people acknowledging the truth of their limited understanding and that of other people.

This theory of property/natural monopoly usually works out to exactly the kind of private property delineations that libertarians define. Sole ownership of a resource is determined not only by deontological or pragmatic oughts, nor only by the norms that tend to develop in greater degrees of rationality and human capital, but also by the very nature of reality and the frontier of possibilities itself. It is an observation of the Natural Law, the way things actually work as a fact.

#Economics #Monopoly #KnowledgeProblem #PublicGoods #TragedyOfTheCommons #NaturalLaw #Property