When a service is both essential and a natural monopoly, employees extracting all of the "immense value being provided" is very, very bad. Suppose the employees

When a service is both essential and a natural monopoly, employees extracting all of the "immense value being provided" is very, very bad. Suppose the employees of SF's water company were allowed to charge the full value provided by delivering water to San Francisco. People can't do without water, and so everyone's water bill would now be thousands of dollars a month, since they have no alternative but to pay it. And the next week, everyone would realize this sucked and anyone who was able to would leave.