Corporations don’t willingly give up money. In circumstances like 1 and 3 they’ll more likely just say “thanks for making line go up more” lol. COVID imposed some supply issues that I would assume are mostly mitigated by now, but I haven’t seen costs decrease, only increase–so now we have record profits in many contexts. Subsidies can sometimes help, but it seems to me that the most effective subsidies (in terms of lowering cost) are those with significant, more powerful corporate players downstream (e.g., corn in the US) rather than those purchased by individual consumers who have comparatively little power.

I don’t know that 2 is necessarily quick, but competition can indeed lower prices if a competitor can actually survive against the behemoths in their respective markets. In those instances, corporations can try to shape regulation to squash the upstarts while leaving the big players alone.

I’m not sure that government really has the ability to lower prices in a way that isn’t somehow perverted by large corporate entities given the power they have.

I’m not very interested in cryptocurrency generally but I’m interested in how the tech works–in addition to the aforementioned issues with security if one party controls a significant amount of the lightning network, wouldn’t lightning also be inefficient if a large percentage of transactions are one-offs? It would generate a transaction on the blockchain to open the payment channel between two accounts and a second transaction to close the account, correct? So if the actual number of transactions is two or less it doesn’t offer any actual advantage?