> but that causes me to consider whether such critical services should be in the hands of for-profit companies?

I believe the idea is that you can have multiple companies for a given purpose and switch between them (or form your own) depending on what you think works best for you and your community. You cannot have multiple governments - if the one elected on an piece of land you happen to live on does not act in your interests, you're pretty much SOL at least until the next election cycle (if it's a democracy) or the next coup (if it's not).

The obligatory caveat is that - of course - this does not work in practice. At the very least, it requires a perfect free and fair market which means it needs us all to be well-informed rational actors. And there are probably more requirements than just this.

The problem with this line of thinking is in people frequently ignore their own interests or just shrug their shoulders and "I got mine" in some way: The absolute easiest example that comes to mind is roads. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people complain about tax on gasoline and how they don't even use the majors roads and highways that much. Mention that nearly every single thing that keeps them alive will in some way require roads to exist and they'll move the goal posts to "I ready pay other taxes" or "I've already paid plenty" or less reasonably "fine let all this go away then because we got along fine 200 years ago without it".

With other things, it's just about impossible to convey to someone with this sort of mindset anything much less direct like the costs of having beauracracies creating and enforcing regulating building codes or workplace standards, and even those are easier to grasp than many other services

Exactly - no disagreement here. But if you understand it and I understand it, can we dream of a day everyone will? :-)

In the meanwhile, I support bureaucracies. Even if the long-term goal is to get rid of them, I currently believe that we desperately need those training wheels for the time being, and trying to dismantle them until we know how to do well without is irresponsible and dangerous.

It doesn’t work in practice. So needs regulators or you end up with cartels. And for regulators you need a government.

We got where we got because this already failed.

That's what I've said, yes. It does not.

Companies tend to deceive customers, as the incentives are frequently aren't aligned, so "voting with a wallet" is not functioning as well as it should. And profit-seeking leads to market consolidation, which, at least past some threshold is a net negative on society and turns into oligopoly.

A vision of a society without a government is utopic. It requires drastically different mindset and understanding of the side effects and unintended outcomes from every living person. Yet, I cannot help but naively like the idea of such society (which is entirely subjective thing), and so I wish we all could be smarter and knowledgeable, stop fighting for resources, and that some distant day whatever becomes of us may live in a world where cartels won't form because everyone understands how that's not really in anyone's interest (paradoxically, I believe that's not even good for the cartel itself in the long term - power and wealth are also a deadly curse).

You can think that someone doesn't deserve the benefit they get from the government but also think it's unfair to impose additional hardship by cutting it off suddenly.

> You cannot have multiple governments

I have 4. City, county, state, and federal.

For most states, there's only two governments--the city and county governments of most states are organs of the state governments and only have such authority as the state unilaterally deigns to let them have.

As for the distinction between state and federal, that's essentially the exception that proves the rule. The reason you cannot have multiple governments is because you end up with a situation of contested authority, and a brief look at US history (and I suspect every other federal system in the world, though I don't have particular knowledge for others) shows a litany of debates over whether state or federal government has primacy in a given jurisdiction. It's only barely tolerable by the fact that, even if the grant of authority to the different governments is unclear, at least the authority to decide who has authority is unquestioned.

The history of private fire departments is a solid lesson in the pitfalls of this perspective.

I did not expect that conclusion in the last paragraph.

It occurred to me that making a point of the type, "here's what I believe is best or here's what I prefer, but I understand that the current reality doesn't accommodate it" represents a level of non-binary nuance and maturity that is exceedingly rare these days. We'd all do well to emulate it.

Oh but they can be just fine, you only need to look outside the States to see it working. They're not perfect either, don't start me on it, but I can see exactly that idea working in Switzerland: the state making the rules for the private providers _and_enforcing_ them. It might be against "muh freedom to rip everybody off" but I personally refuse to call that "freedom".

OTOH, some important things in Switzerland are still state-owned, like the railways or the post.

Some people treat Switzerland like some libertarian paradise, but in reality, while Switzerland does tend to be more economically liberal than many of its neighbours, it's usually pretty pragmatic and not committed to some ideology.

True, I was thinking rather about the health insurance system as a working example of private companies being controlled by state-defined rules.

>acknowledges that the government is performing important functions on which people rely.

>I know there's an argument that the private sector could instead provide some of these, but that causes me to consider whether such critical services should be in the hands of for-profit companies?

I think decentralizing and delegating some of those services to be closer to the people (to state governments) has merit. I agree with the OP that to shift to in that direction there's a right way and a wrong way to do that transition. In today's immediate self gratification culture though you'll get what we're getting. Patience is a virtue we were all born without. It takes displince and strong values to stick with it.