What's to prevent that in a slightly less monopolized system? In some cases, players in a market may all even independently arrive at the same solution and decide not to undercut competition, they may add additional fees (e.g. tuition) to universities across the board. They may find canteens unsustainable with a profit motive.

Functionally, the consumer has the same problem: competition isn't giving them alternative choices and variety, policy and options are mandated to them. Providers may find school canteens too expensive so they close them, the one who thinks an opportunity may open one but be forced to charge a fee too high for participants to consider so ultimately lunches get packed anyways. In theory the market dictates these things from consumer consensus but consumer consensus is really just some degree of a manipulated majority opinion over w minitory. In practice I don't care who dictates it, my voice (dollar in this case) doesn't seem to matter all that much in contexts without healthy competition.

There's definitely some sort of threshold level of actual competition (however we define that) that has to exist to create a landscape of options for the consumer. As time progresses, the argument for private enterprise grows weaker, in my opinion. The solution is for markets to become less anti-competitive, to allow real competition (not sure how we achieve this). An issue is, no one wants to do this and is incentivized to be anti-competitive in every way they can.

>Why do you trust the company will continue to provide said benefits?

Not sure if this is a great example from history. But my 87 year old grandmother still receives a monthly pension check from IBM from my late grandfather who passed away 6 years ago and retired over 30 years ago.

I'm sure IBM wouldn't be making these payments if they had any other option. I think the answer to your question is "because they are obligated to" via contracts signed with employees (and ex-employees, and even deceased employees).

One could counter that example with the multitudes of businesses who failed on meeting their defined benefit pension promises, resulting in laws like ERISA 1974 and PPA 2006, which resulted in businesses ceasing to offer defined benefit pensions because turns out, predicting decades of future economic conditions and insuring volatility for that length of time is insanely costly.

Not to mention that IBM has been dying for a decade+. I certainly would not expect them to make good on any decent size DB pension in a few decades, and unless you are part of a politically connected group, you may or may not get fully bailed out by the feds (see General Motors pension renegotiations in 2008).

See also multi employer pension plans which have crazy regulations where if one employer fails, the other employers gets to pick up the tab.

https://www.americanactionforum.org/insight/the-american-res...

Surely there's no histoic examples of this happening. Especially not in America. /s

Even better: "your salary now comes in Metabux and those can only be used to purchase things at the Metashop."