How about acknowledging that public-utilities are, in principle, a fine idea? In practice, public utilities and the messiness of democracy (especially at large

How about acknowledging that public-utilities are, in principle, a fine idea? In practice, public utilities and the messiness of democracy (especially at large scale) can lead to all sorts of potential corruption and inefficiencies (though not strictly necessarily). Choice is far from a value to prioritize in and of itself. It's a check on power that monopolies and oligopolies have. Choice may be important, but not for its own inherent value necessarily. When you say, "the power should be with the individual", taken to the extreme, that's an anti-organization view; anti-corporate, anti-government, anti-union, etc. and while there's solid philosophy around it, the fact is that coordination of individuals in the form of organized groups are so much more powerful than individuals. The individual right of association automatically leads to situations of power in the associated groups themselves. In other words, individual power is fundamentally unstable in social contexts. Tyranny of structurelessness etc. What we're really dealing with in our market today is a supply-side power imbalance. The supply side is all organized into companies and trade groups, and they have tons of power. The demand side is divided into individuals in many cases, and that in itself makes them dramatically less powerful. What we need is more demand side power in the balance. If there's any way to get that without totally overwhelming the important individual freedoms, it's worth doing. There's no way to get what the supply side offers at all if we broke the supply side all the way down to individuals and blocked them from even forming companies at all. And the only way to actually balance company power on the demand side is to have some associations / teams etc. so that the demand side is similarly organized. Sure, that brings up potential risks to individual autonomy, but we just have to constantly adapt to keep a balance.