I think you’re making a common mistake: that competition leads to innovation that’s good for the customer. Competition, and to a greater extent capitalism, does indeed reward innovation, but innovation that’s good for the customer only happens in markets filled with many small companies. The other, more common, type of innovation is simply cutting corners.

The giant American car companies had been “innovating” for years before they failed so dramatically that we taxpayers had to bail them out. They innovated their costs, and therefore quality, so low that nearly every foreign car maker offered better products. The saddest part is that they couldn’t even cut corners right—is there a right way to cut corners, I wonder?—and their foreign counterparts had decreased their costs while improving quality. If only this was only a problem with cars and public transportation. It happens in every industry, especially those that are monopolized or nearly monopolized.

The problem isn’t Greyhound, it’s capitalism. With two fundamental rules— 1) increase one’s capital, and 2) the more capital you have, the faster you can increase your capital—it seems obvious that many years down the line in a capitalistic society you’ll be left with a few huge income spikes in an otherwise flat curve (the 0.1% of the richest), and the successful companies are picking whatever form of innovation makes their stockholders happier. This is made worse by the fact that those with wealth can influence public policy. Competition and innovation are great, but it turns out that when the only goal is to increase capital, the best way to get there is not to make a better product or keep your customers happy.

Some things are inherently social. These are the things that everyone uses: utilities (water, power, waste disposal and recycling), education, transportation, internet, healthcare, etc. When something is necessary for daily life, it should not be something that makes somebody filthy rich. No one should get rich just because people get sick and need medical attention and their great great grandfather was the first one to open a hospital. No one should get rich just because we need to move people and things in order to have a productive society. No one should get rich because people commit crimes (many states have privatized prison systems). Put another way, my health and well-being should not be a company’s profit model.

America is 50 years behind every other developed country in terms of how its people are cared for, and we have unregulated, “free market” capitalism and a corrupted political system to blame.