An unpleasant surprise for My Book Live owners

Posted Jul 1, 2021 15:02 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: An unpleasant surprise for My Book Live owners by felixfix
Parent article: An unpleasant surprise for My Book Live owners

> The government itself has destroyed its own reputation far more often than private enterprise, yet will never go out of business. No private company could have flipflopped as many times as the government and remained in business.

What does "go out of business" even mean for a non-business? Replaced with... anarchy? Replaced by a violent revolution? Neither sounds like a remotely desirable outcome.

Democracy provides a fairly good approach here: a government that destroys its reputation (while its opposition(s) have a better one) is replaced at the next election. It seems to me that we have a perfectly good analogue there, and governments "go out of business" a lot, smoothly, routinely, and are replaced by others -- usually with no or minimal disruption to services, which is crucial because *lives* depend on these services and they can't just go away when their (often) monopoly provider is replaced.

Monopoly providers in the business world are more or less never replaced so neatly -- at least, not without government action to ensure it.