Capitalism isn’t all or nothing and government expenditure on infrastructure isn’t incompatible with capitalism. There are certain markets (telecom, healthcare

Capitalism isn’t all or nothing and government expenditure on infrastructure isn’t incompatible with capitalism. There are certain markets (telecom, healthcare, mass transportation) where completely “free markets” don’t exist, because they can’t exist, because the nature of the products and consumers are such that one or both violate the criteria for which a free market can exist (lack of perfect information, no competition, etc.) The free market can not create a national telecom network because it can not force all people to pay into it, which is necessary in order to have it built in the first place. The only reason we have the internet as we do is because AT&T was mandated by the government to install phone lines to everyone, everywhere, and charge everyone a fee for decades to pay for it. By its very nature there is no competition and no choice. The old Bell System was a government sanctioned and funded monopoly and no free market would have ever created such a network by itself because that’s not what free markets do. They simply allocate capital effectively in markets which are compatible with the criteria necessary for that kind of allocation to be possible.