> Yes - were it not for municipalities' ability to enforce monopoly rights we would often have multiple landline, cable, garbage, electric and other providers competing on quality and cost.
You are conflating different types of problems.
Things which are natural monopolies are phone, cable, internet, electricity, water, etc. It is needlessly expensive to lay in multiple cables/pipes to a house solely in order to provide competition. Oddly, cable/internet is one of the few places where this actually isn't completely true since pulling a single fiber is almost as expensive as pulling multiple fibers.
I don't know why you cite garbage collection, though. Garbage collection is completely different. I know many towns that have multiple garbage collection services. You don't have to lay in an infrastructure in order to collect garbage.
You are conflating different types of problems.
Things which are natural monopolies are phone, cable, internet, electricity, water, etc. It is needlessly expensive to lay in multiple cables/pipes to a house solely in order to provide competition. Oddly, cable/internet is one of the few places where this actually isn't completely true since pulling a single fiber is almost as expensive as pulling multiple fibers.
I don't know why you cite garbage collection, though. Garbage collection is completely different. I know many towns that have multiple garbage collection services. You don't have to lay in an infrastructure in order to collect garbage.