Christopher Armitage from The Existentialist Republic <cmarmitage@substack.com>
| Christopher Armitage Jul 13, 2026 |
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Vienna applied the same principle to housing. The city owns and operates roughly 220,000 apartments, covers about 60 percent of residents, and the scale disciplines the entire private market. Only 18 percent of Vienna’s residents are rent-burdened, compared to 58 percent in Los Angeles. The Dutch took it further: 284 nonprofit housing associations manage 2.3 million units with zero direct government subsidies, funding the entire operation through revolving rental income. Public housing doesn’t require an endless taxpayer subsidy. It requires the will to build at scale and the discipline to reinvest revenue instead of extracting it.
On May 20, Jeff Bezos went on CNBC to argue that raising taxes on billionaires would not help working people, saying that doubling the taxes he pays would not help “that teacher in Queens.” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani answered on X: “I know a few teachers in Queens who would beg to differ.”
The exchange was about taxes. Compare the records instead. Bezos founded Amazon, which the Federal Trade Commission and eighteen state attorneys general are suing for illegally maintaining monopoly power, with trial expected in 2027. Mamdani has requested $70 million to open five city-owned grocery stores, one in each borough, with the first two sites announced in East Harlem and the South Bronx. He describes the plan as a public option for groceries.
In the same interview, Bezos said “there is so much waste in government spending.” This article is the reply. Intuit has lobbied Congress for more than twenty years to keep the government from offering free tax filing. In one sector after another the pattern is the same: a public program would save ordinary people money, and a billionaire’s company profits because that program does not exist. Mamdani is applying the public option model to groceries. The title of this piece asks whether your city could apply it to online retail, the market where Bezos made his fortune. What follows is a catalog of the public options that already work, the ones that lobbying ended, and the ones a city, county, or state could start building now.
A city or county government could build an online shopping platform inside of 6 months. Local businesses list their products, residents order through the site, and city-hired drivers deliver to the door. The technology exists off the shelf. Open-source e-commerce platforms power millions of online stores. Route-optimization software is a commodity. A city already knows every licensed business within its borders, already collects the taxes that could fund the startup costs, and already has the one thing no tech company will ever have: an obligation to serve the public. Vendors pay a flat fee that covers operating costs. Every dollar of revenue stays in the community as a local paycheck, a local tax payment, a local vendor’s earnings.
Think about what that replaces. Amazon collected $156 billion in fees from third-party sellers in 2024. Between referral commissions, warehouse charges, and the advertising that the platform has made all but mandatory, Amazon now takes up to half of every sale. It doesn’t manufacture anything. It provides a website, a warehouse, and a van. In exchange, every transaction drains money out of the seller’s community and sends it to Seattle, to a company that paid zero federal income tax in 2017 and 2018 and averaged a 5.1 percent effective rate over the four years after that, while the small businesses on its platform paid full freight. A municipal platform has no incentive to manipulate search results, bury competitors, or launch private-label knockoffs of its own vendors’ best-selling products. The platform works for the community because the community owns it.
None of this process involves banning or inhibiting private business operations. It does hurt monopolies by supporting local business, and inhibit predatory business practices such as price gouging and vendor gouging.
Scale it to a network of cities and counties or a state, and we’re talking about public commercial infrastructure that does something Amazon never will: keep wealth in the communities that generate it.
That idea sounds radical until you realize we already do it with the mail.
The USPS delivers to 170 million addresses, including 57 percent of its 33,000 post offices in rural areas where FedEx and UPS refuse to go without surcharges. It moves 1.2 billion prescription drug shipments a year. 2.7 million veterans in rural communities receive 84 percent of their medications through its trucks. UPS actually hands its rural packages back to the Postal Service through a program called Ground Saver because the private carrier cannot profitably deliver to those addresses itself. The USPS generates $80.5 billion in annual revenue and posted a profit in its most recent quarter. It does something FedEx and UPS won’t: it provides a service to everyone, everywhere, and its existence forces the private carriers to compete on speed and convenience rather than gouging captive markets.
That’s what a public option does. The government doesn’t tell a private company to charge less; that’s regulation. It doesn’t hand money to a private company so the company can pretend to be affordable; that’s a subsidy. The government does the thing. Directly. It hires the people, builds the infrastructure, and delivers the service. If a private company can beat that on quality or convenience, it keeps its customers. If it can’t, that tells you everything about what the private company was actually selling.
We use public options every day without calling them that. Public schools have educated American children since Massachusetts established the first ones in 1647; Horace Mann built the modern free system in the 1830s, and every functioning democracy on the planet followed. Today, all but four countries on Earth mandate compulsory public education. This is because self-governance requires an informed electorate, and you cannot have an informed electorate if only the rich and powerful can afford to teach their children to read. Every one of those countries recognized what we recognized when we built the Continental Army: some things have to answer to the public or they stop serving the public. Nobody argues we should replace the military with mercenaries, because mercenaries serve whoever writes the check. A privatized education system works the same way. It stops being accountable to the public the moment it starts being accountable to shareholders. Fifty million American kids walk into public classrooms every morning without a private contractor standing between the teacher and the kid.
The first free tax-supported public library in the world opened in Peterborough, New Hampshire in 1833; today libraries host 1.3 billion visits a year with no subscription fee and no algorithm deciding what we’re allowed to read.
Freedom of movement is baked into the founding promise. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness all require the ability to get from one place to another, and a government that guarantees those rights has an obligation to make that possible. Public transit does exactly that: it guarantees that anyone can get across town for a couple of dollars whether or not they own a car.
These institutions work so well that we forget what they represent: proof that the government can deliver essential services directly, competently, and at a price people can actually pay.
The argument here is simple. Take that model and apply it everywhere a private company stands between people and something they need, collecting a toll for a service the public could provide directly. Apply it not as theory but as a concrete, sector-by-sector blueprint for building the economy that people actually deserve.
And be precise about what “public option” means, because the phrase has already lost its meaning once. Colorado and Washington both passed laws labeled “public option” that really just impose price controls on private insurance companies. The insurer still sits between the patient and the doctor, still takes its cut. The state just told it how large the cut can be. That’s still regulation. Credit where it’s due: those laws are better than what existed before, and the governors who signed them took real political risk to do it. But look at the spectrum. Republicans say let corporations rip people off as much as they want. These laws say the public deserves some protection, so maybe the corporations can make a little less money. A real public option says we will provide the service directly, and if the corporation wants to stay in business, it has to compete. Insurance companies donate heavily to political campaigns, and politicians at every level prioritize the revenue of those corporations over the needs of their constituents because those corporations fund their reelection. That fear is how we end up with laws that still protect the middleman’s seat at the table. Corporations are not constituents. We are the constituents, and we are the ones the government exists to serve. A real public option eliminates the middleman. It doesn’t negotiate with the middleman.
Consider taxes. Every March, roughly 150 million Americans sit down to tell the government information the government already has. The IRS knows your W-2, your 1099s, your mortgage interest. For the vast majority of filers, the agency could send a prefilled return that says “does this look right, sign here” and the whole thing would take ten minutes at zero cost. Dozens of countries do exactly this. The reason the United States doesn’t is that Intuit, the company behind TurboTax, has spent more than $47 million lobbying Congress since 2003 to make sure the IRS never offers free filing. A private company spent decades keeping your taxes painful so it could sell you the aspirin.
The Biden administration finally built the free road. The IRS Direct File program launched in 2024, expanded to twenty-five states in 2025, and 94 percent of users rated it “excellent” or “above average.” The Government Accountability Office called it a success and recommended expansion to all fifty states. Then Intuit spent nearly $4 million lobbying in each of the next two years, donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, and twenty-nine House Republicans wrote to Trump asking him to end Direct File on day one. The IRS confirmed in November 2025 that the program would not be available for the 2026 filing season. Trump’s IRS commissioner told Congress flatly: “I don’t care about Direct File.”
The government built the free tool. People loved it. The toll collector wrote a check and the road got bulldozed. The average American now spends 13 hours and $290 preparing a single return, for a task the government had already automated and given away for free.
That sequence is not unique to taxes. It’s the playbook. Every industry with a tollbooth runs it: build political relationships, fund the campaigns, kill the public alternative before people find out how well it works. But some public options got built before the playbook could stop them, and the results tell us everything we need to know about what happens when the government actually does the thing.
California started making its own drugs. CalRx, the state’s generic drug label, began selling naloxone at $24 per twin pack in May 2024. The National Institutes of Health published a peer-reviewed study showing that generic naloxone prices across the entire market dropped 22 percent in a single quarter after CalRx entered. Not because California regulated prices. Because California made the drug itself, and private manufacturers suddenly had to compete with a product priced to be affordable and sustainable, not to extract the maximum the market will bear. The program generated $39.6 million in direct savings and an estimated $56 million more from the competitive pressure alone. Then California went after insulin. On January 1, 2026, CalRx began selling insulin glargine pens at $11 each through a partnership with nonprofit manufacturer Civica Rx. Branded Lantus from Sanofi costs roughly $424 for the same quantity. The state invested $100 million and projects $2,000 to $4,000 in annual savings per patient. No other state has done this. Every other state could.
The military does the childcare version right now. The Department of Defense runs over 900 centers serving more than 200,000 children. Ninety-seven percent meet national accreditation standards; the civilian rate is 9 percent. Fees scale to family income at roughly 7 percent, with the government covering 50 to 70 percent of costs. Private childcare in New York runs $23,000 to $40,000 a year per child. Military families pay a fraction of that for a service that is, by every measurable standard, dramatically better. The military didn’t achieve this by telling private daycare providers to offer a discounted tier. It built its own centers, hired its own staff, tied pay to training milestones, and runs unannounced inspections. It does the thing.
Vienna applied the same principle to housing. The city owns and operates roughly 220,000 apartments, covers about 60 percent of residents, and the scale disciplines the entire private market. Only 18 percent of Vienna’s residents are rent-burdened, compared to 58 percent in Los Angeles. The Dutch took it further: 284 nonprofit housing associations manage 2.3 million units with zero direct government subsidies, funding the entire operation through revolving rental income. Public housing doesn’t require an endless taxpayer subsidy. It requires the will to build at scale and the discipline to reinvest revenue instead of extracting it.
Each of these examples does the same thing. The government builds the capacity to provide a service directly and offers it at a price people can actually afford. Private companies can still operate. Nobody bans them. But they can no longer charge whatever they want for the privilege of standing between people and a necessity. They have to add genuine value or watch their customers walk to the public road.
And America already does this far more than most people realize. The Federal Crop Insurance Corporation has backed farmers since 1938. The Tennessee Valley Authority provides electricity to 10 million people across seven states and has for nearly a century. Over 2,000 municipal electric utilities, including LADWP and Austin Energy, generate power and revenue for their cities. The National Flood Insurance Program exists because private insurers abandoned flood coverage entirely and the government had to step in. State-run workers’ compensation funds insure millions of employees. FHA and VA home loans let the government act as lender and guarantor, and private banks have to compete with those terms. Public hospitals and county health systems treat patients regardless of ability to pay. State-run liquor stores in control states generate billions in revenue for state treasuries. All of them operate right now, serve real people, and most of them make money doing it.
And the sectors where nobody has built that road yet are exactly the sectors where prices climb fastest and service deteriorates most visibly. Airlines consolidated from ten major carriers to four, abandoned hundreds of routes to mid-size cities, and now charge captive markets whatever they want. A state or regional public carrier doesn’t exist to enrich shareholders; it exists to connect people. Internet service providers charge Americans more for slower speeds than consumers pay in almost any peer democracy; municipal broadband already proves cities can do it better, but telecom lobbyists keep blocking new networks. The Bank of North Dakota has returned profits to the state treasury since 1919 while every other state sends its deposits to Wall Street. Japan Post Bank serves 24,000 locations at minimal cost, and France legally requires La Banque Postale to accept every citizen regardless of income.
A well-run public option should generate revenue. The difference is where that revenue goes. When a corporation profits from insulin or rent or banking fees, the money flows to shareholders on Wall Street. When a public option generates revenue, it flows back to the people, because we are the shareholders. That money funds schools, roads, health care, and the next public option. The USPS generates $80.5 billion a year. Military childcare scales fees to income and still operates. CalRx is already saving Californians tens of millions. These programs pay for themselves and then some. The companies that can’t compete with them don’t say so out loud. They write checks to the politicians who make sure the public alternative never gets built.
Build the alternative.
Think about that municipal marketplace one more time. We are talking about cities building a public option competitor to Amazon. A platform owned by the public, run for the public, where every dollar of revenue stays in the community instead of flowing to the richest people on the planet. The hardware store sells to the neighborhood. The bakery fills orders for next-day delivery. The driver earns a city wage. Local businesses keep their revenue instead of handing half of it to a company that gives them nothing but a search ranking. Scale that to a network of cities and states, and we have built public commercial infrastructure that does for local economies what the USPS did for mail: guarantees access, keeps prices honest, and puts the wealth back where it was created.
The companies that fight hardest against public options are telling us exactly where to build them.
What You Can Do About It
Want to make this happen? You can email this article to your Mayor, City Council Rep, and/or County Commissioner and tell them we deserve more options and more competition in the form of revenue generating public liquor stores like 17 states have, a public bank like North Dakota has, and a public option for online shopping, where local businesses sell and city-hired drivers deliver. You can also ask if they’ll endorse these revenue generating community programs.
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