You speak in broad generalizations that miss many points and make many faulty assumptions. One example:
> govt is not a productive enterprise and so nothing it does can help businesses produce things of value
Governments can offer loans for small business, or work with banks to provide security to banks so that banks can issues loans to small business even though this might not be as lucrative as only focusing on large business.
Governments provide grants for research or results for research directly. Nasa has ton of stuff than just be used directly. There are also programs were an inventor can get money to do research and invent things. There are also government grants for research institutions that do research.
> but you also have abundant choice of street food
Without those government inspectors good luck knowing if that vendor that showed up yesterday is actually serving chicken and not something that tastes like chicken. Also good luck having that meal without a side of cholera. Being healthy enough to work is might not be a government service, but a good government certainly encourages it.
> You speak in broad generalizations that miss many points and make many faulty assumptions.
Absolutely. Let's be specific.
> Without those government inspectors good luck knowing if that vendor that showed up yesterday is actually serving chicken and not something that tastes like chicken.
That assumes everyone cares if the cheap tasty food is actually chicken. It also has the assumption that without the government, there would be a dangerous outbreak of cholera.
With regulation, we need to talk about specific instances, and what the positive and negative effects of that instance are.
> assumes everyone cares if the cheap tasty food is actually chicken
Doesn't need to be everyone who cares Just someone with an allergy or a moral preference to not eat dog.
> without the government, there would be a dangerous outbreak of cholera
All but the least effective governments have demonstrated an ability to stop cholera. Places with grossly ineffective government and poor education has shown a propensity to have cholera, look at Haiti.
I think these are both good. But if we want another example. There was a Chinese restaurant in Council Bluffs Iowa, a suburb of Omaha Nebraska (The city I am in now) that was serving stray cats. The owner thought it was a cheap alternative to chicken. The FDA shut them down, because stray cats don't get investigated for parasites, disease or poison.
In general it never gets this far because the FDA sets an absolute bottom line and most food businesses strive to be better than as can easy be seen with the whole organic and free range trend recently. But there will always be those trying to drive costs down at the expense of quality and safety.
EDIT - I just realized I skipped examples of value governments can add to business. How about seat belt fabric. Memory Foam, Rocket engine designs and satelite imagining for maps. That is just NASA. NOAA does a huge amount for mariners of all stripes. The SBA gives out loans. There are so many examples.
The point I was trying to make is that government isn't the only way to accomplish these things.
While the FDA does quite well at enforcing a standard, there is no evidence that the same practices could not happen as a natural occurrence of a free market.
Clearly, the vast majority of people care that those who prepare the food they buy do so in an educated and safe manner. If there were no law demanding such a standard, people would still want to live by that standard. Those people would still demand that those in the food industry find some way to prove that their business lives up to such a standard.
Such a scenario would still leave out the uneducated portion of the populace, who would unknowingly put themselves at risk. That is the only reason I can think of to prefer the current government-enforced methods.
TL;DR Food safety is an example of a problem that has many possible solutions, and while current government regulation is likely the best, there are other solutions that are possible, and even logical.
To bring this back to the discussion of net neutrality...
While there are logical reasons to support deregulation in most scenarios, I can find no honest logical reasons why not to regulate ISPs with the current net neutrality rules.
When we look at the specifics, we can plainly see that net neutrality is an edge case for popular conservative and libertarian ideology. I find it very important to consider it as such, and support net neutrality.
> govt is not a productive enterprise and so nothing it does can help businesses produce things of value
Governments can offer loans for small business, or work with banks to provide security to banks so that banks can issues loans to small business even though this might not be as lucrative as only focusing on large business.
Governments provide grants for research or results for research directly. Nasa has ton of stuff than just be used directly. There are also programs were an inventor can get money to do research and invent things. There are also government grants for research institutions that do research.
> but you also have abundant choice of street food
Without those government inspectors good luck knowing if that vendor that showed up yesterday is actually serving chicken and not something that tastes like chicken. Also good luck having that meal without a side of cholera. Being healthy enough to work is might not be a government service, but a good government certainly encourages it.