There's certain things that benefit everyone because it's a necessity for everyone. Food, electricity, computers, internet, radio, transportation, education, there's many things which are slightly useful for a few people but are much more beneficial when everyone has access to it at no cost beyond taxation. Businesses benefit from roads, so taxes pay for them. Everyone eats food, so taxes should cover that. If all computers were shut down today, the global economy would collapse, and it's hard to argue that a computer with internet and electricity wouldn't be of benefit to the poorest people in the world, even if that computer is just a smartphone.

Public toilets are expensive to maintain but become more expensive if an area is plagued with a variety of crimes, so parts of the world who have functional laws and law enforcement can afford public restrooms, while places in decline will close their public washrooms to reduce the costs. Remember, washrooms serve a necessity, and places in decline who lack these facilities will begin experiencing outbreaks of diseases associated with developing nations who also have poor sanitation.

A lot of people feel that a government getting too involved is a bad thing. In my opinion, the best thing a government can do is remove distractions and pay for things nobody should think about too hard. Advanced civilizations shouldn't have to waste time calculating expenses to decide whether to pay for rent or food that week, those are collective moments that could have been spent better elsewhere, it isn't even optimizing for productivity, it's just optimizing losses.

Corporations can and have built public toilets and used advertising to cover part of the maintenance costs, but like any business model it's always more profitable and less risky to put in the minimal effort to maintain it.

I believe taxes are necessary to keep things working smoothly, but the real issue here is governments deciding where the money goes, and putting it into things that benefit businesses more than all the people in the country. Profit isn't the domain of the government, an efficient economy is definitely something they can implement policies to create, but there's many more things that are needed to keep cities clean and safe that incur more costs than they can gain back. Police fines shouldn't cover the costs of running the police, fines should go straight into projects that are designed to prevent those infractions in future. If speeding on a straight large road is an issue, why not re-design the road so it curves, is narrower, and implements something like a roundabout which naturally causes cars to slow down? We can calculate how to design these roads so it's almost impossible to break the speed limit, but instead we're fining people.

Hostile architecture is another side of this. In countries that refuse to invest in public toilets, they've created sloped bases at the bottom of building walls so it splashes back on you if you try to urinate there.

I'm obsessing over the public toilet thing, but it encapsulates the problem perfectly. There's a need, there's a solution, but the solution costs more in areas with crime, and by removing the solution you only get the problems. I could have made this about how regions in Africa have an unstable power grid due lack of government funding, and people cut down the power lines during outages to sell the copper wire. They've also tried solving this in that the wealthy will pay for a personal power supply method, but then they need to hire security to ensure they don't get raided, and by the time this is all settled they've functionally done the government's job for them, but only for themselves. I decided to use public toilets because they're something people can either recognize, or it's something they've never seen and they just go into shops to use theirs.

If there's ever a cyberpunk setting in fiction, it should not have a public toilet, because that's almost definitely a contradiction in its themes, because a public toilet implies cleanliness, prosperity, or at worst it's vandalized and in decline and soon to be shut down, but that last one is a transitory scenario and shouldn't be part of an older city.