Terry,
I am not being too clear myself. Luckily, only one guy on the page is paid for his writing skill and he’s good at it.
My point is that you used examples of government doing government. Capitalism cannot do everything and isn’t best at everything, and neither is government. There are often excellent benefits from government. Our problem, as I see it, is that we have government trying to do things best left to capitalism.
When this happens, it can sometimes have positive effects which get trumpeted. What gets left out is that capitalism may have created better results or maybe not, but you cannot now know. What rarely gets discussed are all the negative externalities of government action. Often they are not fully known or even knowable.
So I agree that government projects can be good. Not all desired goals are easy for private institutions and businesses to reach given problems of incentives or government interference or risk.
I just want folks to remember that successful government projects are almost always military or infrastructure oriented. As soon as the politicians and academics start changing word meanings so that “people are our most important infrastructure” or other demagoguery, the result is going to be waste and interference and never ending new bureaucracy.