> We have plenty of historical precedent where market based solutions fared poorly compared to a more command oriented approach. I'm not sure we do. Most parts

> We have plenty of historical precedent where market based solutions fared poorly compared to a more command oriented approach. I'm not sure we do. Most parts of the world have transitioned from state owned power markets to ones that are mostly private sector driven. Even distribution infrastructure is usually quasi-privatized or owned by a collection of generator firms. Things like pipeline networks and power cabling often seem like good candidates for command economies at first, but in practice governments struggle to spend adequately on capital infrastructure. They tend to take over the infrastructure after it's been built by private actors, then slowly run it into the ground over a period of many decades, then privatize it to try and get it off the books, then blame the private sector when it starts to break down despite their attempts to repair the damage. The left then use the parlous state of the network to argue that things were better when they were state run, ignoring that the reason they're now bad is exactly because maintenance and upgrades weren't taken seriously enough during the state run period - and often, that the private sector struggles to drain the tech-debt backlog because of government price controls. The above is basically the experience that the UK has had over the last 150 years with water, rail and now they're adding power to the list. A big part of why the NHS is in a state of collapse, or likewise for the German railways, is because governments systematically prefer to spend money on pay rises for large workforces (=new loyal voters) than on capital infrastructure (=no new voters). Private sector network operators don't have that same problem unless they face a heavily unionized workforce, which is again often a legacy of public ownership and left wing union protection laws. So I think it's a lot more complicated than you make out. A system that transitions between state and private ownership doesn't magically take on the properties it'd have had if that'd been the case all along.