Comment by diego_moita
19 hours ago
> You realize you're arguing for a monopoly, right?
Right! Like all the other monopolies that governments already have: public security (police and courts of law), external security (armed forces), public healthcare in many civilized countries, inspection of health regulations and consumer safety, monetary policy, etc.
> you trust your government not to ever be incompetent
Oh, I don't. But Apple, Visa, Mastercard and Google Pay aren't very "competent" either.
> history has proven that over the long term
History has proven that privatization of many of government monopolies are disastrous: Roman generals making private armies and destroying the Republic, abuse of forced labor from inmates in private prisons, exorbitant fees from payment providers (Visa, Mastercard), food dangerous for public consumption because the governments didn't inspect them, etc.
You're motte-and-baileying here. Arguing that there are natural/desirable monopolies for government to possess in certain high-risk cases does not automatically translate into an argument that it's desirable for governments to have monopolies in every case imaginable. As a rule of thumb, it's best to avoid monopolies wherever possible, and rely on government solving complex coordination problems only as a last resort.
Pointing out that it's reasonable for governments to suppress private armies maurauding around and having wars with each other does not in any way sustain the argument that it's reasonable to allow governments to act as a forced intermediary in everyone's commercial transactions.
> Like all the other monopolies that governments already have
Your examples are things that aren't inherently monopolies and are significantly worse if you try to make them such. It's better to give people the right to self-defense than to put them in jail for violating a "public security" monopoly for not allowing someone else to kill them when there were no police around. It's cruel to prohibit someone from paying for their own healthcare in cases when the procedure exists but the public system won't spend the money. What argument could you even make for prohibiting private inspections of products and services the likes of Consumer Reports?
The things that are better as a monopoly are so rare that they plausibly don't exist.
> But Apple, Visa, Mastercard and Google Pay aren't very "competent" either.
The article doesn't say and I know nothing about India. I could guess consumers are oaying using their smartphones. So Google/Apple duopoly are still the gatekeepers to use UPI making huge profits. Of course using one of the American backends would make their control and profits orders of magnitudes bigger.