My belief is that governments should start with the most basic industries and infrastructure. Things which its population will demand globally, no matter what. Things which minimally benefit from competition yet where said duplication is most costly.
Utilities: water, electricity, gas -- energy in general. Transportation. Infrastructure. No-frills food production (staples). Distribution (supermarkets). In the modern era, computing capacity. Banking, payment services.
Anything where the answer is "does everyone need this at some point or other?", a just government would do well to strive to provide in an efficient manner.
I think you're getting it backwards
The fact that everyone needs something is
not a reason to remove competition, exit, profit/loss discipline, and private alternatives. The other way around, it is a reason to treat these things as
more important, not less important.
If an industry is trivial, like, say, Funko Pop production, then a monopoly is merely annoying. If an industry provides water, electricity, food, banking, transport, or computing capacity, then a monopoly becomes existentially dangerous because the customer has much less room to walk away.
Competition has its virtues, but the inevitable (and massive) inefficiencies that come with duplicating an entire enterprise just to deliver the same product is painful.
No, competition is not just several firms pointlessly building the same thing. It is the process by which different methods, prices, supply chains, quality levels, risk strategies, maintenance standards, and customer priorities are tested against reality.
When duplication is indeed wasteful, then the people who made the bad investment tend to eat the loss. When the duplication is instead useful, then we call it "redundancy" or "resilience" or "capacity"
There are things which, in modern society, should not be done on a "for-profit" basis.
"Not for profit" just doesn't remove the economic problem. Someone still has to decide what gets produced, where resources go, what gets maintained first, which customers are prioritized, how shortages are handled, and what tradeoffs are accepted. Profit and loss are signals that tell producers whether they are creating more value than they are consuming. It is by no means just a private greed layer on top of production.
A state provider just doesn't make costs go away. Instead, costs are moved into taxes, debt, rationing, political bargaining, lower quality, slower innovation, and/or captive funding by people who did not choose the service.
An enlightened, uncorrupted form of government (read: none in God's Earth)
Well, if the case for nationalization depends on a government that does not exist...
Competition is not the only way to improve a given undertaking. It is just an incentive for existing enterprises to do better -- for fear of being snuffed out.
The incentives to do better can come from other places, ones that do not require duplicating an entire company just to deliver the same product.
You're really underselling competition there. Competition is an entire correction mechanism. Customers can leave, investors can stop funding failure, competitors can try different methods, bad decisions impose losses on the people making them, good decisions attract more resources.
Anything related to law enforcement and the military. Undoubtedly a very unprofitable industry mainly funded by government entities, rather than private individuals.
Huh?
Law enforcement and military services in their current form are "unprofitable" largely because they are not structured as market services
in the first place. They are funded via taxation, insulated from ordinary customer refusal, and operated as monopolies over coercion. The lack of profitability does not show that these things should be nationalized. On the contrary, it shows that they
already sit outside of normal market discipline.
Plus, there's also an important distinction to make between security, defense, arbitration, investigation, insurance, restitution etc. as services and the state's claimed monopoly over final coercive authority. The former are genuine services, the latter is a political privilege.
If you're arguing that industries become suitable for state control whenever they are difficult to fund through voluntary means, I reckon the argument quietly replaces "customer benefit" with "forced funding"
