• iocase@lemmy.zip
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    2 days ago

    It’s a natural result of incentives I think.

    “Show me your incentives and I’ll tell you the outcomes”

    So I think the most likely course of action is it runs its course and it all collapses due to the rich 1%'s hubris. What incentive do the majority of the 1% have if they practically own nothing relative to the 1% of the 1%? That’s when you get elite civil war and infighting. Maybe they’ll realize on their own that this is headed towards disaster? Again, I think incentives make that almost impossible.

    The alternative I would prefer to see is nationalization of natural monopolies like rail, telecom, power, natural gas .etc. they all operate as the definition of a natural monopoly (actually basically all of the duolopolies I listed are partial or complete natural monopolies)

    Natural monopoly: where the cost of building a network is extremely capital intensive, requires dedicated Right Of Way (ROW) procurement or eminent domain, and where the marginal cost of adding more customers or running more freight is almost zero compared to building the network in the first place.

    Natural monopolies shouldn’t be private enterprise since they by definition can’t be competed with. Are we going to build a second parallel power system? Is every house going to have 5 natural gas stubs for 5 competing natural gas pipeline networks?

    All of those deserve to be nationalized. It’s the reason oil monopolies either get split up or they get nationalized. Oil is a different beast though where you can have companies competing at each step of exploration, extraction, transport, refinement, distribution, storage .etc (each is almost its own natural monopoly though in each category.)