Infrastructure and education are two fields where it is often easy to demonstrate positive ROI. Of course not every project is good, but in general both drastically increase the productivity of their society.
Food stamps and pension funds are a bit harder, since they mostly boil down to three arguments: ethics, crime and stability. People tend to turn to crime when they have no viable other means, so feeding them is a way to reduce crime, and crime would cost more. Also people who are desperate are more likely to revolt, which is either very costly to the government or entirely prevents them from doing other activities with positive ROI in the future. So they are cost centers, but arguably necessary.
Postal service, telephone, internet and public transit would also fall in the infrastructure category. Societal benefit is often much larger than the willingness of the individual to pay for it, so it makes sense to have them either run or subsidized by the state.
Universal healthcare can deliver positive ROI by being more effective than the private alternative. As a society we want citizens to be healthy, because healthy people are happy and productive, and don't infect other healthy people.
I completely agree that governments should regularly run and publish ROI calculations, or maybe there should be an independent watchdog that does this. And a lot of money seems to be wasted because people on all levels of government have the wrong incentives. On the other hand, one of the major reasons why the idea of governments is so widespread is that they regularly do provide positive ROI overall.
Food stamps and pension funds are a bit harder, since they mostly boil down to three arguments: ethics, crime and stability. People tend to turn to crime when they have no viable other means, so feeding them is a way to reduce crime, and crime would cost more. Also people who are desperate are more likely to revolt, which is either very costly to the government or entirely prevents them from doing other activities with positive ROI in the future. So they are cost centers, but arguably necessary.
Postal service, telephone, internet and public transit would also fall in the infrastructure category. Societal benefit is often much larger than the willingness of the individual to pay for it, so it makes sense to have them either run or subsidized by the state.
Universal healthcare can deliver positive ROI by being more effective than the private alternative. As a society we want citizens to be healthy, because healthy people are happy and productive, and don't infect other healthy people.
I completely agree that governments should regularly run and publish ROI calculations, or maybe there should be an independent watchdog that does this. And a lot of money seems to be wasted because people on all levels of government have the wrong incentives. On the other hand, one of the major reasons why the idea of governments is so widespread is that they regularly do provide positive ROI overall.