Sneering at "free stuff" is a vicious Repuke attack on the very idea of public goods.

[HereSince1628]

7. If your house catches fire, a capitalist wouldn't care, if it ignites his, he does.

That protection of private investment promotes shared/public interest.

You might think everyone would want to live in a safely built and well maintained homes that wouldn't catch fire. But not everyone can afford to and not every landowner would consider it a profitable investment to make investments to protect against fires. So, we have to erect laws and enforce those laws to collectively protect private assets.

Consequently, fire-fighting goes way deeper into public interest than fire-trucks and fire-fighters. It's about zoning, and building codes, and building inspection and maintenance, it's about planning, distributing fire-hydrants and parking regulations, snow removal from streets, etc.

Boring, over long argument, right? You wanted to keep it on socialist fire-fighting, etc. But you see, that really is tone of the issue. How far will individual awareness and concern be allowed to be stretched? Lots of people can't see the good of all that regulatory stuff that interferes with their freedoms. Large numbers of people really place the boundaries of their concern about providing for the welfare of their neighbors' lives/property and even opportunity in different places.

Public enterprises, whatever they are, are all subject to the balance of where those boundaries are placed. I can without hesitation say that centralized government control of all productivity is a bad thing. Likewise I can without hesitation say that private ownership of all productivity is a bad thing. I'm less able to tell you where the optimum placement of the limits of social and capital control should be.