America should have a public option for everything

Government-run retirement accounts and banks would be a good start. But why stop there?

Post office
(Image credit: (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images))

In town meetings across Vermont last week, residents voted in favor of converting the Vermont Economic Development Authority into a public bank. Modeled after a similar bank in North Dakota, the Vermont proposal would create an institution that held and invested the state's funds locally, on the hope that doing so would provide a boost to the local economy and cut out middlemen bankers.

The Vermont public bank proposal is actually almost boringly modest in its scope. But the broader idea of creating government-run enterprises is an extremely interesting one, and gets way less attention than it ought to. Indeed, public agencies at the municipal, state, and federal level should be far more aggressive in directly running businesses in order to provide public alternatives to private competitors.

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Matt Bruenig writes about poverty, inequality, and economic justice at Demos, Salon, The Atlantic, The American Prospect, and The Week. He is a Texas native and graduate of the University of Oklahoma.