If you want GPS and are happy to pay for it then why should I pay if I can get it for free without paying? With GPS the idea of encrypting the data might work, but that doesn’t work for say vaccination were public safety results from individual choices.
But it still works because people can see that they're better off funding something that benefits them even if it also benefits someone who didn't pay, and so it is whether it's a government or not.
Now, sometimes a government might be more efficient at these things. Having people pay for GPS might be one way to get it, but then you have to collect money from everyone, which has administrative costs, and people who can't afford it can't use it even though there is no incremental cost in providing it to them.
But when you weigh that against the colossal amount of waste and violence governments commit in the process, the math doesn't look good. And you can get the same level of efficiency from a nonprofit that provides the service for free to the public, if the public wants it enough to donate to it. Which people would have more money to do if they weren't paying taxes to fund the maintenance of empty government buildings etc.
Do you think the US would vote for or against the UN to making a global competitor?
https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/modernization/sa/
You can find a list of good reasons why they should never want to do this, but one of the big ones is that if they ever actually did they could only do it once, because then no one would trust them not to anymore and would start including hardware support for the alternative systems in case it isn't available.
But that isn't really the point. The relevant issue is that the US taxpayer pays for GPS and then the people of Italy and Australia and Brazil get it for free. Even if GPS had been an exception with some strategic defense purpose, how does that explain e.g. funding for cancer research?
I think this is a really cynical take. A government opens up a service that's benefitted billions for 50 years and you think it's so the US gets them "hooked"? They use it because it gives them value, and they (we) didn't have to pay for that value at all.
Whereas if the only people who want corn subsidies are the people receiving them and not the people paying for them, you wouldn't have them anymore.