Whenever I see articles like this the questions that occurs to me is: Why limit this to banks? Why not have a publicly owned restaurant? Convenience store?
Banks are literally the cornerstone of the economy. I'm not aware of any restaurants of convenience stores that are even close to being as critical or 'too big to fail.'
Banks aren't too big to fail just because they are banks. If they weren't allowed to get so big or merge together, they they wouldn't be too big to fail.
They're too big to fail because politicians decided they were. Of course, they aren't actually too big to fail. In the financial crisis, if they hadn't bailed out the banks, they'd either be acquired by competitors, or go out of business and people would have actually learned their lessons to not take on excessively risky assets. Instead, the government bailed out the banks, essentially telling them that they should take on whatever risk they want, because they'll just be bailed out whenever they fail.
We kind of do. Food Stamps / EBT cards are sort of like a public grocery service. And Exchange Stores are quite literally public-owned retail stores for Military members - https://www.shopmyexchange.com/ is basically a government-owned government-run WalMart/Amazon. And there's a public-owned restaurants (cafeteria) inside various government buildings, like the Longworth House Cafeteria.
Except they’re the opposite. They’re simple redistribution between private entities. EBT doesn’t mean a public employees’ union now runs yojr grocery store.
Right. One way to look at it might be "the less judgment you need to run a service, the more viable it will be as a non-profit". Hence the success of credit unions and the office coffee pool.
Restaurants and stores need a lot of judgment by comparison.
