Except there is already quite a lot of competition in the market. Tesla is by no means a monopoly, and the automobile market has traditionally never had a monopoly problem. It's just that Tesla happens to have the strongest product today. That will inevitably change in the future as other manufacturers catch up, but traditionally the capital allocation to potentially worthy competitors has been driven by market signals so as to ensure that we not only have competition for the sake of competition, but actual competition among effective "planners". The aforementioned California actions are not being made on that basis. E.g. why Hyundai? Why not up-starts like Lucid Motors or Polestar? Why not Volkswagen or Toyota or GM? Most institutional investors that operate on market forces make their allocation decisions based on actual financial models and tend to prefer startups over large incumbents due to the asymmetric upside.

That said, we actually agree that competition is a good thing — despite its near term inefficiency — and hence we then agree that central planning is sub-optimal. The question then becomes, between "democratic central planning" and "decentralized market planning" which system of resource allocation is better at fostering competition and actually high quality goods and services? From where I sit, there's been no real evidence that democratic planning is necessarily better at fostering competition than market forces, and in fact there's plenty of evidence to the contrary. While you're correct that there's a necessary role for the state to prevent monopolies from forming, this isn't the same as actually creating and establishing the competing planners from the get-go.

Another example highlighting the mis-incentives in play when democratically planning:

NASA's planned SLS moon mission is over budget and behind schedule. Because the boosters aren't reusable, each launch is expected to cost $1B (with a B) dollars — EACH launch! Meanwhile SpaceX's target cost-per-launch is $50M. We can probably agree that NASA's approach is grossly inefficient, but you might charitably make the case that NASA is just fostering competition by propping up Boeing as a worthy competitor to SpaceX. Except...Boeing's track record has shown that it's a rather weak competitor, and worse, it's become increasingly difficult for new entrants to participate in the aerospace industry owing to Boeing's state sanctioned entrenchment. SLS is also pretty classic NASA; basically every US swing state has to have a plant manufacturing something for it so the Congresspeople approve it — again not a decision made out of a need for efficiency, competition, nor to provide the better product, but on the basis of political expediency.

Again, the nuanced reality is that democratic planning can probably work at some layers (though even at the local level, there have been some notable disasters[1][2][3]). It could also be that once you get to a certain size, there are diminishing returns to effectiveness of "democratic planning", and at worst after a certain point it becomes actively detrimental, just based on outcomes we see at the Federal level.

[1] https://twitter.com/michelletandler/status/14484838413504512...

[2] https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1448460530289676289

[3] https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1448464328848396290