If highways are such a great deal, why does the government have to fund them?

If national defense is such a great deal, why does the government have to fund it?

If FDIC insurance is such a great deal, why does the government have to fund it?

Why does the government have to do anything? Why don't private investors jump in and do everything?

The answer is: because there are certain things that are only a great deal if they are done by everyone all at once. Left to individual players, sometimes the incentives align like running from a bear--I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun one other person.

This is why we have government at all. Humanity was not handed a government, we invented it to solve problems that could not solved by piecemeal individual action.

And for TARP, a reminder that it came after Lehman failed and money markets broke the buck. The first House vote on TARP failed. It was adopted at the last minute, only as it became clear that it was necessary.

I accept that national defense is not a profit center, neither are highways. But they are good for everybody so it's ok that the taxpayer pays for them. The same may be true for TARP but I don't like to hear that TARP made profit because it didn't. Since 2008 we had huge deficits, banks got a backstop for free, the fed had to take on a lot of assets it normally should't have to, interest rates are very low. These all have a price.

TARP was not a benign thing but instead we should make sure this never happens again.

Highways are absolutely a profit center. The Fed spends ~$50 billion/year on highways and gets ~20% of the entire productivity of the nation in return. ($4 trillion on $20 trillion GDP)

If the entire highway system increases GDP at least $250 billion (1.25% of GDP) then highways are profitable.

There do exist a lot of private roads. If govt did not build them for free, there would obviously be a lot more of them.

But the government didn’t build them for free. We collectively paid to build them, and now they more than pay for themselves. Roads are arguably the greatest investment the American taxpayer has ever made.

Building pubic-use roads without government planning, permitting, and eminent domain is frankly not going to scale, aside from the nightmare of how all the different owners of these roads would go about rent-seeking.

"National defense" is such a poor example that it throws everything you've said into doubt. It is not a great deal to spend more than every other nation on earth combined, just to murder lots of people in other parts of the world. Those murders are of negative value to decent Americans.

I'm talking about government spending on national defense in general, not the current U.S. budget specifically.

The rest of us are talking about USA spending during the time that NASA has existed.