Promote consumer choice requirements in as many business sectors as possible. Where we have consumer choice, competition is fierce, prices come down and quality goes up. This is because the business owner knows if he doesn’t compete, less customers will buy his product or service. He also knows that if he has the better offer, he can take his rival’s business. We see this with things like supermarkets, cars, mobile phones and holidays.
Where you don’t get consumer choice there is much less incentive to innovate and improve. Look at train companies with a monopoly on the lines they operate, water companies, schools and the NHS. All of these are very expensive often bad service (been to A&E recently?) and slow to innovate.
We need to push for direct consumer choice where the money in the end users pocket determines which service they use. And that bad companies either improve or go out of busines. Its the only way to get better ones, survival of the fittest.
Governments role in this is to make sure the companies are following the rules and remove monopolies. After that they should leave well alone.
I think a more accurate way to state this idea would be “remove government enforced private monopolies”.
I agree that nearly all the worst services we get are from these “monopolies”.
Government contracts etc are really a large issue. There is a good talk on just this issue from the Mesis institute (US libertarians) on the railways in the US, where the government was paying companies for every mile of track laid, so they were creating these ridiculous bending and careening tracks.
Basically all beaten by someone coming in building with private funds a straight line (I believe it was Vanderbilt), finished it first and basically became a railway mogul.
Monopolies are not bad if they are a natural monoply where the buisness dominates because it clearly does the job best.
The issue is when there are government enforced ones, where they either ban others from operating or massively increase the barriers to compete through over regulation usually on behalf of the existing monopoly.
Only having one operator use a train line is one of the worst ways to ensure service. Private sector innovates to survive if they are guaranteed to survive by government then dont need to innovate.
