Possibly (haven’t read Heinlein myself), but I know that, unlike Heinlein’s decentralized and unrealistic libertarian utopia, McDonald’s take of “Libertarians IN SPACE” focuses on the dynastic struggles between the corporate families that benefit from the system’s inequalities.
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Interesting notion. Here in LA, we have both a municipally-owned water system and residential trash/recycling/greenwaste pickup, but the users pay for both those things, not the taxpayers.
Our water & electric utility, the LADWP, has never been supported by tax dollars. The original aqueduct was built by borrowed bond money, repaid ahead of schedule by revenue from water and electricity sales. (The aqueduct is entirely gravity-fed and doubles as a hydropower system).
In fact, it’s not a taxpayer expense at all, it’s a taxpayer benefit: affordable, reliable power AND a major revenue stream for city coffers.
Likewise, residential trash pickup was instituted in the '50s to eliminate the backyard incinerators that were smogging up the air, and for some time, users were charged a fee (billed on the sewer services bill) for pickup.
A few years ago, the mayor attempted to balance a city budget shortfall by marginally increasing those fees to pay for more police officers. But activists and the courts shot that down, saying fees could only be used to pay for the fee-based service — otherwise, it’s a tax increase, and needs a two-thirds majority vote.
So the city did an in-depth study to see just how much trash pickup actually cost them - and they ended up tripling the fee, because it actually cost way more than people had been paying.
So now they could hire new cops with the general fund, since the cost of trash collection was now paid entirely by the new user fees. (-:
So, yeah, users pay at point of use for both water and trash pickup (and electric!), with no funds at all from the taxpayer.
Last I looked, there were about a dozen municipal wifi operations in California, some fee-based, some free, and some only in downtowns/business corridors.
The nearby People’s Republic of Santa Monica has free outdoor wifi covering most of the city.
One can easily argue of course that the indirect civic benefits of free broadband more than justify the taxpayer investment, but it’s not as straightforward a business case as water or trash pickup, which, at least here, are self-supporting fee-based services.
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Sounds like another sf idea that is taking place on earth as we speak. 
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Hey @doctorow, have you used Burbank’s free municipal WiFi – provided by Burbank Water and Power? They even provide commercial service (for a fee).
https://www.burbankwaterandpower.com/bwp-free-wifi
Their commercial service One Burbank
Yeah, but 6 months? They’re not going to change the law in 6 months. So we need more loopholes.
Like, they’re not allowed to sell Internet… what if they give a month of free internet away as a free gift with a purchase of “Corrupt Senator” Bobblehead dolls which, out of SHEER COINCIDENCE happen to cost whatever the going rate for Internet is these day + the cost of the bobbleheads themselves. They make a new corrupt senator every month.
Or, they can’t sell it, but a raffle where the entry fee is (cost of Internet) and the number of winners is (population)?
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isn’t it great? we’re living in the FUTURE!
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It’s so GREAT! 
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When they haven’t been disenfranchised by the criminal “justice” system. And when they can afford to take days off work to acquire an ID. And another day off work to spend six hours in a voting queue. Assuming that they’re willing to brave the Trumpist thugs waving guns around outside the election booth, and the cops standing by to check black voters for warrants.
Confederate democracy is a sick farce.
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The downside of user-pays public services are that they’re inherently regressive: both rich and poor require trash collection, but a fee that is trivial to the rich is a major burden to the poor.
OTOH, the downside of free-for-all services is the tragedy of the commons; free services tend to be undervalued and wasted. There’s always that one dickhead who tries to sneak the industrial waste from his backyard business into the residential trash, or who uses the free internet to try and download every TV show ever made.
In a lot of cases, a mixed approach seems best: pay for essential services from the general fund so as to more equitably spread the burden, while maintaining a token point-of-use charge to reduce wastage.
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