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Algon comments on Why capitalism? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Ok, so I'm not advocating a world where there is suddenly no business modal and everyone does whatever the hell they want.
I'm advocating (seriously, the book was really comprehensive and very good) the Commons as a governing scheme, wherein members share their resources and have general rules of self governance. This has happened around the world, and there are many isolated communities which have practised this governance model for centuries.
And in regards to your last point, I didn't say that companies would fund anything like this. It would in fact be the people themselves. That is, utility companies will pass on the cost to their customers in the form of small hikes, and the rest will be absorbed by the government over about three decades.
Things like this (upgrade of the electricity grid) have happened before, and they were also public ally funded. For example, in America in the early 20th century, many people didn't have electricity as they were living in rural areas. The then power companies didn't want to invest in them, as they thought rural homes were too few, too spread out and lacking in purchasing power. As a result, the government attempted to do it themselves. And thus the rural electric administration was born.
Sadly, the government could not do provide power to rural America all be themselves. So what did they do? They encourage rural farmers to form electric co-operatives, and granted them low-interest loans along with technical and legal assistance.
The result? Rural America got electricity for about 40% of the cost of what the utility companies estimated it would cost. Massive economic benefit shortly followed.
Agreed! But this is why it's important to keep "free" separate from "cheap." At some point, someone will want something and not obtain it. The questions are what, why, and who. Capitalism seems like the best scheme for answering those questions, because of the various properties I discussed above (and some that I haven't brought up yet).
One of the strengths of capitalism is that it allows voluntary organizations to spring in and out of being--and so people can form whatever cooperatives they want, to take advantage of any new ideas or differing economies of scale. When things move from 'expensive' to 'cheap,' the sorts of organizations that exist around those things change accordingly.
Government is useful primarily for involuntary organizations--which have their benefits, but also their drawbacks, and should be employed with caution. It seems very likely to be proper to enforce nonviolence on the population through violent means, while much less likely to be proper to enforce a particular purchase or behavior on the population through violent means. But there are other purchases or behaviors that it may be proper to enforce, and so on.