Hi El Kabong...

What needed consumer benefit does the DMV provide? To keep this from being a trick question, here are some possible benefits...

-make roads safer by limiting entry to the 'privilege' of driving (but the existing requirement that we have insurance would, in the abscence of the DMV, take care of this issue).

-provisioning of identification (But I am against mandatory universal ID as it is a basic violation of human liberty, and besides DMV ID is basically useless at solving the problem)

-making it easier to recover your vehicle if it is stolen because it is identified (but as in #1, giving some external entity a financial interest in recovery of your vehicle would better handle this).

-I certainly do not, in any way shape or form, consider it a 'consumer benefit' to suck up to the government in order to secure the rather basic human right (not privilege) of human transport. Yes...I honestly believe that I have a basic human right to drive my car on the public roads, subject to the same sorts of 'time place and manner' restrictions that apply to my First Amendment rights to free speech.

So...does that cover the possible consumer benefits provided by the DMV, or did I miss something?

I don't know about the position of other's, but I am not arguing that the government is _generally_ more responsive to people's needs.

I am arguing that the empirical evidence that I have seen shows that municipal provisioning of 'public utilities' works better than market based provisioning of those same services.

You write this "Similarly, is a brilliant, innovative FTTH expert likely to look for a civil service job with his town, or with a company that eats, lives and breathes FTTH?"

To which I would offer the observation that in my area (Sonoma County 'Telecom Valley' California), all of the companies that eat, live and breath networking have laid off all of their brilliant engineers. And every commercial effort to provide high speed internet is suffering.

I will further offer that a large number of the truly brilliant people who come up with truly brilliant ideas in our society are not motivated by money...

And I will finish by reiterating that municipal utilities appear to provide better service at a lower cost than private utilities. This is observation (and of course subject to observer's bias on my part!), not theory.