Now people feel forced to move away from cities, where good internet is cheap, to rural areas that may lack it, in part because housing in cities often is restricted to single family dwellings and apartments are much harder or impossible to develop, making city living extremely expensive. Zoning is in effect a subsidy on those who enjoy it, and is an effective way of discriminating against the poor. It should be easier for people to enjoy the benefits of city living, without being a millionaire. A rural internet subsidy is unnecessary and unjust.
Please no. Fast internet shouldn't be an entitlement. Not only would such an entitlement be an unjust subsidy for certain lifestyles, but it'll promote corruption. Also it'll limit still faster internet. That'll just limit, because out of consistency it can't be introduced until everyone can benefit simultaneously.
There are always benefits to living in denser areas, and disadvantages, as with rural areas. Why not just move to the place that has the things you most value, that is, make your own trade-offs? You're basically saying that while you have your cake, you want the rest of us (taxpayers) to give you the icing. Good grief!
Just because something is hard, that's no reason to throw in the towel. This is a discussion over subsidy policy, so it's completely fair game to disapprove of a given subsidy. When healthcare & housing come up, it's fair game for you to reject those. In fact, instead of expressing resignation, why not support a kindred soul?
In some industries, choosing not to do business with those companies implies choosing not to do business period.
Then change your industry. There is not and ought not to be a right to find profitable work in any given industry. Find something which has a promising opportunity for you.
Oh who are we kidding. People that buy Apple products typically don't use them strenuously and treat them as disposable either through failure or next year's model.
Which means that right to repair laws are unnecessary.
You cannot be serious. Right to repair laws definitely will put burdens on manufacturers to do stuff, change stuff, provide stuff, and manage stuff that they are not otherwise obligated to do. They also will change their business models (greater competition from the used market). If these laws cost the manufactures nothing, then they wouldn't fight them so hard. Try to see it from their perspective. These burdens will cost the company more, which will put upward price pressure / downward profit (which is ultimately the same thing). Yes, I repair my gadgets, but I don't think most people would want to pay extra for that ability, but right to repair laws would force consumers to pay more (either in dollars or reduced availability). If consumers prioritized easy repair, then more devices would have that. I don't even see it mentioned in reviews. It's quite clear that nowadays consumers would not pay much for repair. So devices don't have it.
Well put. The fact is that people should stop crying about not getting what they didn't pay for, that is, convenient repair, which isn't free. Right to repair laws will have the effect of raising prices, which mostly will affect the cheapest devices, so poor people.
Your property right is to your device, not to the manufacturer doing anything else for you. If these repair rights are so important to you, then pay for them: only buy from manufacturers who provide guarantees of convenient repair and available inexpensive parts and free documentation. Understand that such guarantees change the business model for making devices, and almost certainly will raise prices. Manufacturers would provide this if enough people would pay for it, but realistically they won't. So you want something for free: you want to, in effect, take something from the manufacturer that you didn't pay for. They owe you nothing, they are not your slave. Nor are you theirs.
As I understand it, proposed "Right to repair" laws aren't actually giving you a right to repair your gadget, but rather a way to make it more convenient for individuals and third parties to repair by forcing the manufacturer to provide things like removable batteries, parts, documentation, etc. Other than DMCA silliness whereby copyright is have somehow argued to relate to you opening up or repairing a device you own, a legal strategy employed by John Deere I believe and that I don't defend, you can repair your device right now unless you legally agreed not to. So the lesson is: if repair is important to you, don't buy things you can't repair. Don't agree (by signing, etc.) to contracts that limit your ability to repair, if that's important to you. The fact is, repair isn't all that important to people, otherwise they'd pay more to a competitor that made repair more convenient. Don't assume someone else will give you things that you didn't pay for (like convenient repair). It strikes me as somewhat shameful that people knowingly buy things that are hard to repair, then cry about how they're hard to repair. You are not entitled to Apple or the guy down the street doing the things you want, unless you made a deal for those things. In summary, right to repair law proposals are designed compel manufacturers to comply to a government mandate, because presumably consumers can't be trusted to behave in their own economic interests.
Don't get me wrong, I love repairing my devices, but I don't feel like paying for pricier ones just because of that. It's not even clear that such repairs are advisable for most devices and people, given the rapid technological change and relatively low prices.
While there is a standard claim that under *perfect competition* (an infinite number of negligibly sized producers), the price does drive to the marginal cost, we don't live in a world of perfect competition, nor is perfect competition necessary to see the benefit of a market economy. The actual difference between price and marginal cost becomes part of the profit incentive for new competitors. It's not very promising to enter a business that has many competitors precisely because there isn't much money to be made. The profit incentive acts as a kind of economy-wide priority signal to attract entrepreneurs to those businesses where price minus marginal cost is greatest. And when they do enter, the competition is increased, and price minus marginal cost likely decreases eventually.
The alternative you suggest of involving the government would make politicians set economic priorities. The very idea smacks of central planning, picking winners and losers, and is a magnet for crony capitalism and corruption.
It is absolutely the case that entrepreneurs may not choose to enter any given market for a time, leaving money on the table, as it were, and letting prices stagnate or even increase. That to me is not a moral problem at all, but more like a cookie waiting for someone to eat so long as they make the effort to reach for it. The alternative of government involvement most definitely is a moral problem, as it amounts to compelled labor (forcing producers to sell a product at a given price), a kind of amalgam of slavery and theft, and a definite affront to human choice.
Apparently in eyeglasses people don't care that much about the current prices, relative to the benefit they get from them.
There is no fundamental problem here that requires the use of government force.
You can absolutely use Julia productively without getting into all the extra stuff. You can write code similar to Matlab or Numpy. Later, when you want more performance, you can delve into types more. Admittedly, the documentation emphasizes the multiple dispatch sophistication, and maybe Julia has a longer on-ramp than Python. In the past Julia was evolving very quickly, but now that 1.0 has been released, you can stick with that. But there is no other new language that has as strong a community dedicated to readable, powerful high-performance numerics. And the appeal of Julia is not that it does what currently Python or R can, but it's a better place for libraries to written by experts in the language itself. I can't think of a better language for doing research in numerical optimization, when you're really exploring new ideas and not just plugging into someone else's canned, but confining, "solutions". Most Python numerical libraries must, for performance, ultimately rely on C or C++ underneath, so becoming expert at Python does not help you in contributing to new high performance libraries. By contrast, high performance libraries for Julia can be written in Julia itself, so therefore Julia can be a very good long term investment. Please, tell me what high performance Python numerical libraries are written in Python, without C or C++?
These things would go along much as they did in the 19th century, when the federal government was not involved: people would vote with their dollars and their actions, and USA went from a poor country to a rich one, despite a civil war. People don't tend to go to restaurants that have a reputation for serving food that makes people sick, so poor food quality doesn't survive. Knowing that there's no paternalistic savior to protect you, you've got to look out for yourself and your interests, so you don't put just any old food in your mouth. You ask around, you behave cautiously, and once you a felt the waters out, only then do you embrace new things. You know, like any mature adult. Having the government always act like the parent makes us children, and that isn't fine by me. Nowadays we have allowed the government to provide us with the illusion that we can engage in risky behavior and all will be fine.
Please don't endorse licensing. It replaces one problem (labeling experts) with others (determining criteria for labeling experts, determining who performs said determinations, temptation to entrenchment and corruption of those in positions to do these activities, infantilization of everyone else as they are now reliant on "licensed experts [sic]" and thus relax vigilance).
Because your alternatives are so practical for most people after decades of fucking up our cities due to zoning.
"Hmm...I can't afford an Uber....I know! I'll buy a horse!! Or dig my own subway!!"
Funny, but I am no supporter of zoning (despite personally benefitting from it). Sure I like peace and quiet, but nobody granted me a perpetual right to no boarding houses, high density building development, retail stores, etc. in my neighborhood. I looked it up recently, and it turns out to have really started only in the 1920s, if memory serves. More getting rid of rifraff and probably some bits of racism too. Even there, communities where resident mutually agree to bind their properties to a covenant limiting the kinds of allowable development were present and totally possible without the government forcing people to do things with threat of prison, fine, etc. Invariably, some mob gets the idea of limiting individual rights for truly specious reasons, and we get all kinds of unintended consequences. Voluntary choice should be the dominant model; people seem to forget this.
I'd like to see the numbers supporting your claim. My guess is that public education may pay for itself up to around grade 8, but then the total benefit falls off rapidly (using GDP, say). Measuring seems difficult here. The people who are most adapted to higher education would probably get there through private means in most cases. If you gave people the choice between free high school and free money equivalent to it's cost, my guess is that people would take the cash at a 10:1 ratio. Many of those who take cash would still continue to educate themselves, just much more cheaply, and in areas that they find clearly beneficial. I'm sure some people would use the possibility of people who'd forgo further education to justify that people should just be given free education, but understand that you'd be literally saying that people (families) would be making worse choices than the State, which is belittling and ultimately fascist (State knows best). I constantly hear the condescending tone from public educational administrators and teachers who appear to truly care more about their cushy jobs through reminding us about their bogus credentials and paying lip service to helping "underserved" communities, instead of actually making local kids the best educated in the planet.
Either way externalities exist in businesses. The most successful are liable to be those that shift the cost to future generations or to others.
Any proof that? How about: greater profit by figuring out how to get greater productivity? It currently takes much less resources and human effort to produce a nice apple than it ever did in history. Figure out even small improvements in any costly industry, and you could do well if you play your cards right.
Want uber to be "fair"? Just make sure the total amount of regulation they face is the same as an ordinary cab driver faces.
Those taxi rules, especially medallions in NYC, have always been unfair to all the potential cabbies who might have made a little extra money for themselves. The idea that someone has a government protected lock on an industry is positively medieval, yet it exists. Let's get rid of guild-like laws, like licencing in various industries. If customers demand a seal of approval before paying for a ride or stay, then you can make a business around reviews, etc., wait, that's what Uber and Airbnb do. Why can't free people make deals just engage consensually? Nobody should be guaranteed a trade for life: it necessarily disadvantages all those who might like to enter that trade.
Other than envy, why should you care that someone is making more, a lot more, than you? If you are doing better than before, for the same effort, that's awesome! Absolute poverty is dropping like a stone, even without government help, because by specialization and trade, we're all incentivized to do what works best in our own individual circumstances. Relative poverty, which is what you're railing on about, will only seem to go away in communism, which of course it won't because everyone except the leaders will be poor (think USSR, GDR, Cuba, North Korea): putting in the effort to become much more productive than others without reward gets old fast.
You've got to be kidding. There are often many alternatives to a given kind of transportation: walk, run, own bike, rent bike, horse, hitchhike, motorcycle, moped, bus, subway, *move to closer location*, decide that the trip wasn't worth whatever they're charging, etc., etc. You're not going meta enough in your options. In the West, except in rare cases (that IMHO should be reduced to the absolute minimum necessary for the bare survival of the government and citizens), you can say "no" to anyone's offer. That's what freedom is and ought to be. There should in effect be no "offer you can't refuse". If there seems to be, either someone is coercing you, or you already had agreed to it as an implication of another agreement that you voluntarily signed/agreed to, e.g., the fine print. Unfortunately, under the guise of the so-called public good, etc., we're passing laws that limit our freedom in various ways. For example, in NYC I can't just put a taxi sign on my car and start looking for clients. All kinds of regulations, medallions, etc. Maybe it would not be wise for some random New Yorker to get into my random car for a cheap ride (e.g., I could be a criminal, etc.), but I could work to convince the person it would be fine by developing a reputation (brand), etc. Totally without government interference. As I understand it, the development of taxi regulations was basically a gift to the established cabbies to limit competition, with the "benefit" of less congestion and less rifraff, thus a bloody guild!
Finally, you have no right to a taxi or Uber: they are not literally your slaves nor you theirs.
It's not a fantasy. Just trade. And if you founded a new, independent colony on some new planet, trade would absolutely be in the interest of the colony's survival. Try opening your own business. You will be strongly incentivized to do the things that are most profitable for you. And that's good for the overall economy, though it puts pressure on your competitors, but keeps you (and them) in check.
Sure, we get some benefit, but some benefit much more than others. Google maps is like a gateway drug to many other Google services, since it works so well with that data. So to some extent the revenue Google generates by "giving away" its "free" services is borne by Landsat. I'm not sure about the most appropriate way of quantifying this, but intuitively the benefits of Landsat (users vs. Google) is unequal.
Because it would likely cost more to administrate the program that would charge for access. This is about 0.0000001% of Federal expenditures. Who really cares?
You might be right, and in that case, it would be impractical to charge for access. But that practical concern is not a disagreement in principle. It's conceivable that someone could make a business for cheaply charging for access to popular services, reducing taxes overall. Of course, there's always the possibility of cronyism even in that, which I would join you in despising. That suggests the need for transparency, not armchair recommendations of access policy.
Other than giving a name and protecting the status quo, do you have an actual argument? Besides, toll roads already charge heavier users, and fees are often charged for government services like passports, even when no one seriously thinks that fees cover all the costs, taxes do as well.
There is nothing about civilization that mandates a principle that people pay equally for unequal uses. The very effectiveness of the price mechanism co-adapting supply and demand in free markets suggests at least the possibility that some pricing logic for government services may increase the degree of civilization, as fewer resources are lost through inefficient allocation.
Slashdot Mirror
Now people feel forced to move away from cities, where good internet is cheap, to rural areas that may lack it, in part because housing in cities often is restricted to single family dwellings and apartments are much harder or impossible to develop, making city living extremely expensive. Zoning is in effect a subsidy on those who enjoy it, and is an effective way of discriminating against the poor. It should be easier for people to enjoy the benefits of city living, without being a millionaire. A rural internet subsidy is unnecessary and unjust.
Please no. Fast internet shouldn't be an entitlement. Not only would such an entitlement be an unjust subsidy for certain lifestyles, but it'll promote corruption. Also it'll limit still faster internet. That'll just limit, because out of consistency it can't be introduced until everyone can benefit simultaneously.
I totally agree: no subsidies. They're unfair, and they breed corruption.
There are always benefits to living in denser areas, and disadvantages, as with rural areas. Why not just move to the place that has the things you most value, that is, make your own trade-offs? You're basically saying that while you have your cake, you want the rest of us (taxpayers) to give you the icing. Good grief!
Just because something is hard, that's no reason to throw in the towel. This is a discussion over subsidy policy, so it's completely fair game to disapprove of a given subsidy. When healthcare & housing come up, it's fair game for you to reject those. In fact, instead of expressing resignation, why not support a kindred soul?
In some industries, choosing not to do business with those companies implies choosing not to do business period.
Then change your industry. There is not and ought not to be a right to find profitable work in any given industry. Find something which has a promising opportunity for you.
You can choose not to buy a Tesla.
Oh who are we kidding. People that buy Apple products typically don't use them strenuously and treat them as disposable either through failure or next year's model.
Which means that right to repair laws are unnecessary.
You cannot be serious. Right to repair laws definitely will put burdens on manufacturers to do stuff, change stuff, provide stuff, and manage stuff that they are not otherwise obligated to do. They also will change their business models (greater competition from the used market). If these laws cost the manufactures nothing, then they wouldn't fight them so hard. Try to see it from their perspective. These burdens will cost the company more, which will put upward price pressure / downward profit (which is ultimately the same thing). Yes, I repair my gadgets, but I don't think most people would want to pay extra for that ability, but right to repair laws would force consumers to pay more (either in dollars or reduced availability). If consumers prioritized easy repair, then more devices would have that. I don't even see it mentioned in reviews. It's quite clear that nowadays consumers would not pay much for repair. So devices don't have it.
Well put. The fact is that people should stop crying about not getting what they didn't pay for, that is, convenient repair, which isn't free. Right to repair laws will have the effect of raising prices, which mostly will affect the cheapest devices, so poor people.
Your property right is to your device, not to the manufacturer doing anything else for you. If these repair rights are so important to you, then pay for them: only buy from manufacturers who provide guarantees of convenient repair and available inexpensive parts and free documentation. Understand that such guarantees change the business model for making devices, and almost certainly will raise prices. Manufacturers would provide this if enough people would pay for it, but realistically they won't. So you want something for free: you want to, in effect, take something from the manufacturer that you didn't pay for. They owe you nothing, they are not your slave. Nor are you theirs.
As I understand it, proposed "Right to repair" laws aren't actually giving you a right to repair your gadget, but rather a way to make it more convenient for individuals and third parties to repair by forcing the manufacturer to provide things like removable batteries, parts, documentation, etc. Other than DMCA silliness whereby copyright is have somehow argued to relate to you opening up or repairing a device you own, a legal strategy employed by John Deere I believe and that I don't defend, you can repair your device right now unless you legally agreed not to. So the lesson is: if repair is important to you, don't buy things you can't repair. Don't agree (by signing, etc.) to contracts that limit your ability to repair, if that's important to you. The fact is, repair isn't all that important to people, otherwise they'd pay more to a competitor that made repair more convenient. Don't assume someone else will give you things that you didn't pay for (like convenient repair). It strikes me as somewhat shameful that people knowingly buy things that are hard to repair, then cry about how they're hard to repair. You are not entitled to Apple or the guy down the street doing the things you want, unless you made a deal for those things. In summary, right to repair law proposals are designed compel manufacturers to comply to a government mandate, because presumably consumers can't be trusted to behave in their own economic interests. Don't get me wrong, I love repairing my devices, but I don't feel like paying for pricier ones just because of that. It's not even clear that such repairs are advisable for most devices and people, given the rapid technological change and relatively low prices.
While there is a standard claim that under *perfect competition* (an infinite number of negligibly sized producers), the price does drive to the marginal cost, we don't live in a world of perfect competition, nor is perfect competition necessary to see the benefit of a market economy. The actual difference between price and marginal cost becomes part of the profit incentive for new competitors. It's not very promising to enter a business that has many competitors precisely because there isn't much money to be made. The profit incentive acts as a kind of economy-wide priority signal to attract entrepreneurs to those businesses where price minus marginal cost is greatest. And when they do enter, the competition is increased, and price minus marginal cost likely decreases eventually. The alternative you suggest of involving the government would make politicians set economic priorities. The very idea smacks of central planning, picking winners and losers, and is a magnet for crony capitalism and corruption. It is absolutely the case that entrepreneurs may not choose to enter any given market for a time, leaving money on the table, as it were, and letting prices stagnate or even increase. That to me is not a moral problem at all, but more like a cookie waiting for someone to eat so long as they make the effort to reach for it. The alternative of government involvement most definitely is a moral problem, as it amounts to compelled labor (forcing producers to sell a product at a given price), a kind of amalgam of slavery and theft, and a definite affront to human choice. Apparently in eyeglasses people don't care that much about the current prices, relative to the benefit they get from them. There is no fundamental problem here that requires the use of government force.
You can absolutely use Julia productively without getting into all the extra stuff. You can write code similar to Matlab or Numpy. Later, when you want more performance, you can delve into types more. Admittedly, the documentation emphasizes the multiple dispatch sophistication, and maybe Julia has a longer on-ramp than Python. In the past Julia was evolving very quickly, but now that 1.0 has been released, you can stick with that. But there is no other new language that has as strong a community dedicated to readable, powerful high-performance numerics. And the appeal of Julia is not that it does what currently Python or R can, but it's a better place for libraries to written by experts in the language itself. I can't think of a better language for doing research in numerical optimization, when you're really exploring new ideas and not just plugging into someone else's canned, but confining, "solutions". Most Python numerical libraries must, for performance, ultimately rely on C or C++ underneath, so becoming expert at Python does not help you in contributing to new high performance libraries. By contrast, high performance libraries for Julia can be written in Julia itself, so therefore Julia can be a very good long term investment. Please, tell me what high performance Python numerical libraries are written in Python, without C or C++?
These things would go along much as they did in the 19th century, when the federal government was not involved: people would vote with their dollars and their actions, and USA went from a poor country to a rich one, despite a civil war. People don't tend to go to restaurants that have a reputation for serving food that makes people sick, so poor food quality doesn't survive. Knowing that there's no paternalistic savior to protect you, you've got to look out for yourself and your interests, so you don't put just any old food in your mouth. You ask around, you behave cautiously, and once you a felt the waters out, only then do you embrace new things. You know, like any mature adult. Having the government always act like the parent makes us children, and that isn't fine by me. Nowadays we have allowed the government to provide us with the illusion that we can engage in risky behavior and all will be fine.
Please don't endorse licensing. It replaces one problem (labeling experts) with others (determining criteria for labeling experts, determining who performs said determinations, temptation to entrenchment and corruption of those in positions to do these activities, infantilization of everyone else as they are now reliant on "licensed experts [sic]" and thus relax vigilance).
Because your alternatives are so practical for most people after decades of fucking up our cities due to zoning.
"Hmm...I can't afford an Uber....I know! I'll buy a horse!! Or dig my own subway!!"
Funny, but I am no supporter of zoning (despite personally benefitting from it). Sure I like peace and quiet, but nobody granted me a perpetual right to no boarding houses, high density building development, retail stores, etc. in my neighborhood. I looked it up recently, and it turns out to have really started only in the 1920s, if memory serves. More getting rid of rifraff and probably some bits of racism too. Even there, communities where resident mutually agree to bind their properties to a covenant limiting the kinds of allowable development were present and totally possible without the government forcing people to do things with threat of prison, fine, etc. Invariably, some mob gets the idea of limiting individual rights for truly specious reasons, and we get all kinds of unintended consequences. Voluntary choice should be the dominant model; people seem to forget this.
I'd like to see the numbers supporting your claim. My guess is that public education may pay for itself up to around grade 8, but then the total benefit falls off rapidly (using GDP, say). Measuring seems difficult here. The people who are most adapted to higher education would probably get there through private means in most cases. If you gave people the choice between free high school and free money equivalent to it's cost, my guess is that people would take the cash at a 10:1 ratio. Many of those who take cash would still continue to educate themselves, just much more cheaply, and in areas that they find clearly beneficial. I'm sure some people would use the possibility of people who'd forgo further education to justify that people should just be given free education, but understand that you'd be literally saying that people (families) would be making worse choices than the State, which is belittling and ultimately fascist (State knows best). I constantly hear the condescending tone from public educational administrators and teachers who appear to truly care more about their cushy jobs through reminding us about their bogus credentials and paying lip service to helping "underserved" communities, instead of actually making local kids the best educated in the planet.
Either way externalities exist in businesses. The most successful are liable to be those that shift the cost to future generations or to others.
Any proof that? How about: greater profit by figuring out how to get greater productivity? It currently takes much less resources and human effort to produce a nice apple than it ever did in history. Figure out even small improvements in any costly industry, and you could do well if you play your cards right.
Want uber to be "fair"? Just make sure the total amount of regulation they face is the same as an ordinary cab driver faces.
Those taxi rules, especially medallions in NYC, have always been unfair to all the potential cabbies who might have made a little extra money for themselves. The idea that someone has a government protected lock on an industry is positively medieval, yet it exists. Let's get rid of guild-like laws, like licencing in various industries. If customers demand a seal of approval before paying for a ride or stay, then you can make a business around reviews, etc., wait, that's what Uber and Airbnb do. Why can't free people make deals just engage consensually? Nobody should be guaranteed a trade for life: it necessarily disadvantages all those who might like to enter that trade.
Other than envy, why should you care that someone is making more, a lot more, than you? If you are doing better than before, for the same effort, that's awesome! Absolute poverty is dropping like a stone, even without government help, because by specialization and trade, we're all incentivized to do what works best in our own individual circumstances. Relative poverty, which is what you're railing on about, will only seem to go away in communism, which of course it won't because everyone except the leaders will be poor (think USSR, GDR, Cuba, North Korea): putting in the effort to become much more productive than others without reward gets old fast.
You've got to be kidding. There are often many alternatives to a given kind of transportation: walk, run, own bike, rent bike, horse, hitchhike, motorcycle, moped, bus, subway, *move to closer location*, decide that the trip wasn't worth whatever they're charging, etc., etc. You're not going meta enough in your options. In the West, except in rare cases (that IMHO should be reduced to the absolute minimum necessary for the bare survival of the government and citizens), you can say "no" to anyone's offer. That's what freedom is and ought to be. There should in effect be no "offer you can't refuse". If there seems to be, either someone is coercing you, or you already had agreed to it as an implication of another agreement that you voluntarily signed/agreed to, e.g., the fine print. Unfortunately, under the guise of the so-called public good, etc., we're passing laws that limit our freedom in various ways. For example, in NYC I can't just put a taxi sign on my car and start looking for clients. All kinds of regulations, medallions, etc. Maybe it would not be wise for some random New Yorker to get into my random car for a cheap ride (e.g., I could be a criminal, etc.), but I could work to convince the person it would be fine by developing a reputation (brand), etc. Totally without government interference. As I understand it, the development of taxi regulations was basically a gift to the established cabbies to limit competition, with the "benefit" of less congestion and less rifraff, thus a bloody guild! Finally, you have no right to a taxi or Uber: they are not literally your slaves nor you theirs.
It's not a fantasy. Just trade. And if you founded a new, independent colony on some new planet, trade would absolutely be in the interest of the colony's survival. Try opening your own business. You will be strongly incentivized to do the things that are most profitable for you. And that's good for the overall economy, though it puts pressure on your competitors, but keeps you (and them) in check.
Sure, we get some benefit, but some benefit much more than others. Google maps is like a gateway drug to many other Google services, since it works so well with that data. So to some extent the revenue Google generates by "giving away" its "free" services is borne by Landsat. I'm not sure about the most appropriate way of quantifying this, but intuitively the benefits of Landsat (users vs. Google) is unequal.
Because it would likely cost more to administrate the program that would charge for access. This is about 0.0000001% of Federal expenditures. Who really cares?
You might be right, and in that case, it would be impractical to charge for access. But that practical concern is not a disagreement in principle. It's conceivable that someone could make a business for cheaply charging for access to popular services, reducing taxes overall. Of course, there's always the possibility of cronyism even in that, which I would join you in despising. That suggests the need for transparency, not armchair recommendations of access policy.
Other than giving a name and protecting the status quo, do you have an actual argument? Besides, toll roads already charge heavier users, and fees are often charged for government services like passports, even when no one seriously thinks that fees cover all the costs, taxes do as well. There is nothing about civilization that mandates a principle that people pay equally for unequal uses. The very effectiveness of the price mechanism co-adapting supply and demand in free markets suggests at least the possibility that some pricing logic for government services may increase the degree of civilization, as fewer resources are lost through inefficient allocation.