> Go research benefit and pensions. People in these government organizations get life-long pensions that they did not pay for. They also get life-long health coverage...they did not pay for. These pensions are unsustainable without the "profit" in the form of ever-increasing taxation, bonds and other methods.

Yes. Public money subsidizes public transit, and that money comes from taxes etcetera. I'm not sure how any of this is supposed to contradict what I said, which explicitly acknowledged that public transit examined in a context-free vacuum is often a money loser—do you think I imagined that the funding for it pops out of thin air? The point is that mass transit is necessary for cities to function beyond a certain density, so the economic dividends of a growing city must in part be credited to it.

You could probably make a reasonable argument that if workers kept more of the wealth they create then public transit could more easily operate in the black. Instead, the people least likely to use it keep most of the money the people most likely to use it might have spent on it. Holding our current (extreme) wealth inequality equal, the solution to this is to disproportionately tax the wealthy to fund it. They may make a fuss, but they (or at least we) should remember that they made their money on the back of a functioning society.

Most of the very large cities in the Western world do appear to have relied to some degree on public transit to attain that status, so if you want to argue that it was actually an economic drag they'd have been better off without, the onus is on you to put together the spreadsheet (or whatever) proving that.

(We also have a problem of it being extremely expensive to build public transit in our cities, much moreso than in e.g. European countries with heavily socialist policies. To me, that suggests that there's a lot more going on here than big government bad, big corporation good.)

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> Government is bad at executing on just about everything.

> Their role should be to engage in creating the legal and regulatory framework within which entrepreneurs have to function in order to deliver goods and services.

There's a problem here, which is that the latter is something they will have to execute on, and I bet neither of us believes our current government is up to it. So that begs the question: if we did have a government actually capable of executing well on hard problems, why should they not directly solve the public problems that private enterprise is not well suited for, i.e. the ones that do not produce tangible local profits in the short to medium term?

Our government put men on the fucking moon, and IG Farben made Zyklon B for the Nazi gas chambers and bought slaves from the SS to use in lethal medical experiments. The right answer isn't easy; it may not exist at all, in the sense of having a destination and a workable route thereto through the intermediate configuration space. It's certainly not going to be as simple as people on Twitter want to imagine it is. Unfortunately, your vision of government stepping back to let private enterprise (with a gentle guiding hand) create a utopia where all people are provided for in their every need seems just as hopelessly idealistic as anything else.