Some services are provided by a single, or very small group of, service providers. Should they be taken over by the most relevant level of government?

We have government control of a lot of things – air traffic, for example. We have inadequately centralized government control of more things – Stock Exchanges, for example. We might be better off if we had government control over more things – compulsory licensing for needed drugs, for example. (If you think we have government control over this, go check out the Apotex experiment with AIDS drugs for Africa. The “enabling” legislation created a procedural nightmare, as it appears it was designed to do.)

We have few news sources, news is almost monopolized. We have few fuel sources. Natural gas delivery is a monopoly for me. Our Internet is delivered by deliberately checker-boarded individual companies that have monopolies in their “squares”. Clearly in all such cases the potential for abuse exists.

Thus the question: are we monopolized? and if we are, should government take over the monopoly? Is it just a choice between being greedily run, versus badly run? That’s the dumb question here.