GPS has made a major impact on our world. How is it a free service that anyone with a phone can access? How is it profitable for companies to offer services like navigation without subscription fees or ads?
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The US government spends tax revenues on maintaining the GPS satellites, and it understands that providing free location services boosts the economy in a wide variety of ways. An obvious example is the way the world’s smartphones mostly use software designed in California; whole industries have grown out of nothing because of the free availability of GPS. But in fact, there are a million ways that accurate location data benefits the economy. For example, simply getting deliveries to their destination quickly and accurately increases “productivity”: because of GPS, more people can do more work more efficiently. As a result, economic growth – and thus, tax revenues – increase.
The US government understands that provision of services from a social fund (taxes administered by a central government) is much more efficient than leaving it to the free market. It’s the same basis on which it provides roads, police forces, farm subsidies, not to mention all the industries which depend on the defence industry. It all helps economic growth, which helps everyone in society.
Left to the free market, we would have no satellites, let alone free ones. Everything to do with space is so expensive, and so risky, that no private corporation would ever invest in it; there would always be safer ways to use the investors’ money. It needs the government of a major industrial nation to take on the risk of failure. Luckily for all of us the US government, while pretending to hate socialism, actually spends trillions of dollars every year on projects like GPS which use social funding to create socially-owned assets which benefit society. It’s pure socialism.
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