I was perhaps too coy.

https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660...

I'm not even sure what to say about maps.

Sure, because the government is supposed to provide infrastructure, which in turn allows all kinds of other stuff to flourish on top.

All those examples that private capital gave - who built the internet and spent enough money to create the early market for computers?

>I still not getting it.

If the government is supposed to supply education, health, and infrastructure, then it needs to be paid for somehow. Corporations don't care since there is no immediate monetization possible (plus tragedy of the commons aspects) and the free market simply assumes this stuff appears out of the thin air (externalize the cost somewhere else).

That's an extremely lazy and superficial analysis.

Where did the foundational ingredients for each of those things come from? Computers, networks, video compression, touchscreens, materials, ... heck, even pagerank, and a large fraction of the breakthroughs in ML/AI (till very recently) have come from academia -- through publicly funded research. Companies are very good at solving the "last mile" to apply technologies towards making products, but don't typically have the vision or the wherewithal to pursue deeper innovations.

Yeah yeah, SpaceX exists now, decades after all the very tough and very expensive initial work.

Imagine how much more we could have now if the space program budget was more than a fraction of a percent. That won't be fixed by just giving more money to the govt.

Science is incremental, often is done with out clear end products, and value can only really be measured much later typically in terms of wide spread effect. Like the internet existed decades before everyone used the internet. And only because tax dollars supported it.

Thus if you want more output, they only true solution is to fund much more science than is funded today.