I hadn't heard of this, so I just looked it up, and it's an interesting story! However, it seems a bit more complicated than just "big government muscled out th

I hadn't heard of this, so I just looked it up, and it's an interesting story! However, it seems a bit more complicated than just "big government muscled out the little guy and screwed everything up." The "mosquito fleet" you referred t was apparently down to only two companies by the early 1930s, and down to one by the end of that decade. At that point, the ferries were already a de facto monopoly. Saying the ferries were "nationalized" makes it sound like the government forced a bunch of operators -- or, well, that single operator -- to quit and just took over their business, but again, it looks like it's a bit more complicated than that. That remaining operator, the Puget Sound Navigation Company, got into a big fight with their union when they were demanding higher wages -- and the one point the state can be blamed for in this original saga is that they refused to let the operator raise their fares, although they were largely responding to public demand, according to the Seattle Times in 1951 (when this happened): the public didn't actually like that private operator, and thought they had raised their fares too much over the past decade while providing increasingly worse service. PSNC decided not to restart service, and the state offered to buy them out -- again, not what most people would call "nationalization." If the state did a bad job running the ferries for the subsequent decades up until about the 2010s, there's no immediately accessible litany of complaints I can find. An investigation in 2017 seems like it's led to a lot of accusations about how the ferry service's labor costs had been managed since 2012. In any case, this is fascinating history -- but it doesn't seem like a resoundingly knockout argument for "private monopoly good, government-run service bad."