Chapter 30: Competition

Fine-grained services

There are thousands of small public services, each operating independently and transparently under public scrutiny. This structure promotes competition and prevents monopolies or concentrations of power. Take the police force as an example. Instead of being a single, centralized institution, it is composed of many services and operators, organized by type of work and by district. This fine‑grained structure emerges naturally under tax choice. Because people hold diverse opinions and tend to allocate their tax contributions to local services, the result is a decentralized system that reflects pluralism in the community.

Public services are great for the public

In this system, taxpayers aren’t just funding public services… they’re designing them. Because when taxpayers act together, they become the most powerful consumers in the economy. They decide what features a service must have. They set the terms. And that means public services end up being great for the public. Let’s break down what that actually means.

  1. Highly Regulated: In the free market, producers face minimal regulation. But public services operate under strict contracts written by taxpayers themselves.
  2. Non‑Discriminatory: The constitution requires public services to treat everyone equally. Equality is built in.
  3. No Welfare Trap: Because public services are available to everyone, earning more money never reduces your access to them.
  4. Privacy Protection: Public service contracts typically require state‑of‑the‑art security, modern encryption, and strict privacy rules.
  5. Customers Own Their Data: Anything you create inside a public service belongs to you. You can download it, delete it, or move it to a competitor. Standardised data formats make switching effortless.
  6. Safety: Products have high standards for safety.
  7. Environmentally Responsible: The public will tend to promote services that protect the environment.
  8. No Anti‑Competitive Behaviour: Contracts can ban non‑compete clauses, ban restrictions on customers or suppliers, and require open standards to prevent vendor lock‑in. No tying, no bundling, no manipulation.
  9. Free Speech: Platforms for social media and news have to be impartial and support free speech.
  10. Modular and Interoperable: Public service products must plug together cleanly, using open standards that avoid lock‑in and encourage innovation across services.
  11. Open Source: Software and designs created for public services are typically published openly, so everyone benefits from the innovation.
  12. No Advertising: Public services tend to be ad‑free. No manipulation, no attention‑harvesting, no noise.
  13. No Price Manipulation: Prices are fixed in the service contract. and often the price is simply zero. Operators can’t play games with surge pricing or hidden fees.
  14. No Product Crippling: Public services won't deliberately disable features just to upsell you a more expensive version.
  15. Many Public Services Will Be Free: Because taxpayers think like users, they often choose to make services free for everyone. Take public transport. Charging for it creates inconvenience, requires expensive ticketing infrastructure, and reduces usage. which increases traffic, emissions, and road wear. Making it free eliminates all of that.

Picture a tax‑funded e‑commerce platform: free to use, open to all businesses, no restrictions, fully interoperable, open‑source, and built to protect privacy. Or imagine public services for search and social media: neutral, transparent, ad-free, and designed to uphold free expression.

Streaming platforms illustrate the case of monolithic platforms broken up into modular parts. Today, services like Netflix and Disney+ lock content inside closed ecosystems. A better model separates content, infrastructure, software, payments, and user interfaces: creating granular competition and delivering a single integrated service that excels in every way.

When taxpayers control the terms, public services become exactly what they should be: safe, fair, open, privacy‑respecting, environmentally responsible, and designed for the people who actually use them. That’s the power of socialising consumption instead of production.

Consumer power

Taxpayers can direct enormous funds into services that compete head‑on with private products. This collective funding power can reshape entire industries.

Consumers naturally allocate their tax contributions to the services they value most. That means far more public services than we see today, such as in banking, commerce, video sharing, and networking. And this poses a serious challenge for giants like Google, Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook. Competing against taxpayer‑funded services backed by trillions of dollars is nearly impossible.

As a collective, taxpayers wield immense consumer power. They can create tenders for new services, specify the features they want, and fund them with millions. Just as quickly, they can withdraw support and terminate contracts. This power ensures the market serves the people, not the other way around.

Avoiding techno‑feudalism

Economist Yanis Varoufakis has warned that capitalism is mutating into techno‑feudalism: a system where Big Tech platforms act like digital lords, locking users into closed ecosystems and extracting rents from their data. This constitution directly counters that danger. By funding open, modular public services through tax choice, it dismantles monopolies, prevents lock‑in, and ensures that citizens, not corporations, define the digital infrastructure of society. In place of digital serfdom, it guarantees freedom, transparency, and genuine competition.