Public Competition Is Very American

Capitalism without competition is guaranteed to fail. Sometimes, we have to provide the competition using the government.

We're hearing a whole lot about socialism again these days. That's been the refrain from the Republican Party and the right wing in general when it comes to Democrats, progressives, or really anybody who suggests an alternative to complete and utter privatization. But before you glaze over your eyes thinking this is gonna be some ridiculous economics lesson, bear with me for a moment.

Here's what they don't want you to remember: America was built on government and private industry working together. Alexander Hamilton figured this out at our founding—for a country to build wealth and industry, it needs government as a builder, investor, and purchaser. Not socialism. Not communism. Competition.

This happened over and over in America. Building New York City's subway. Building our aqueducts and water systems. Sometimes private contractors were used, sometimes the public directly employed the people doing the work. Same thing with healthcare—across states, massive amounts of our healthcare infrastructure was owned by the state, county, or city. Were they the only game in town? No. There were private hospitals, nonprofits, clinics. But the existence of public options created competition.

And competition is the engine of capitalism. Without it, the whole system breaks down.

It's like when you get pushed up against the wall by a contractor telling you a bathroom remodel is gonna cost you $15,000. You don't just say OK. At some point, if there's no other game in town, you're gonna have to learn how to build it yourself. But as a nation, it doesn't take learning how to build a bathroom—it just takes hiring people to do that.

We've gotten ourselves into a situation where we've privatized so many of our basic necessities that by their very nature tend towards monopolistic tendencies. They become massive, almost single payer entities—except instead of being a government-backed single payer entity where you have some accountability with voters, it's a corporate single payer entity that you have zero accountability with as a consumer.

When it comes to healthcare, education, housing, and utilities, if there's only one provider, you don't have much of an option. You'd say, "Well then you can just get in there and start it up," but this system works with the government to make it harder to enter those markets. Let's go out and start our own bank. Let's go out and start our own hospital. By God, that ain't easy. Rural hospitals are closing. If it was easy business, everybody would do it.

Look at the numbers. Americans pay $13,432 per capita annually for healthcare compared to $7,393 in comparable countries. Our infrastructure projects cost $383 million per mile compared to $238 million globally. New York's Second Avenue Subway cost $2.5 billion per mile—eight to twelve times comparable European projects. 80% of hospital markets now qualify as "highly concentrated" under federal antitrust standards. America has one-third fewer grocery stores than 25 years ago.

Here's the critical point that too many liberal Democrats miss: if government just acts as a purchaser—writing seemingly endless blank checks to corporations—all it does is drive prices through the roof. When government money chases private goods without creating an alternative supply, you get an out-of-control affordability crisis.

Housing subsidies without public housing construction just inflate rents for landlords. Healthcare subsidies without public options just pad insurance company profits. Obamacare was designed to help people buy private insurance, but the industry figured out ways to game the system—an explosion of prior authorizations, narrow networks, and sky-high deductibles. It's a lawyer-written, complicated-ass system instead of simple, old-fashioned competition: you make your mousetrap, I'll make my mousetrap, let's see who does better.

Government doesn't have to be a job killer—it can be a job creator. Government can be a builder. There's nothing inherently better about a corporation than a county. We fundamentally need both, but we can't just write checks. When the government spends money, it needs to be in the production of things, in productivity.

That's what China is doing right now. They're producing about 80% of their new energy in renewable solar, wind, and geothermal. They're building magnetic high-speed rails that move faster than airplanes. They're not just buying goods and services from private companies—they're building capacity, creating alternatives, and forcing private actors to compete or get left behind. And they're using our system to do it—the American system.

The fact is that if we can't get healthcare to become substantially cheaper—I'm talking about half the price—we're in big damn trouble. If you look around the globe, you can see that's absolutely possible, but it's not gonna be through a purely capitalist system with no government intervention. When the government acts solely as a regulator and check writer but not as a player, all that happens is prices go up. And Elon Musk becomes the first trillionaire.

The most common sense solution is: if somebody's charging me $1,000 for insulin and I can make it for four dollars, then by God, let's make it. If somebody is charging me $150,000 for a quadruple bypass but it only costs $15,000 to do it, then we need to build our own capacity.

We've sold this country off for scraps for decades, given away what was built by generations of blood, sweat, tears, and sacrifice. If we need to get to the moon, we don't need Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. Most of the technology they're using was built by NASA.

It's important not to confuse insane privatization and the giving away of our capacity with capitalism. That is just as destructive to capitalism as communism would be because it yields very similar results: an ultra-wealthy, ultra-powerful top and an ultra-poor bottom, with a few people in the middle doing pretty well. That's not functional capitalism; it’s more similar to feudalism with a little veneer.

Real capitalism requires robust competition, and sometimes the only way to ensure competition exists is for the people, through their government, to provide it themselves.

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