> I am wholly against imposing my own personal virtues on other people though. Why are you so comfortable doing so?
I'm only explaining the world as I see it, just as you did in the comments above. You shouldn't be so dismissive of dissenting opinions.
In my opinion, your viewpoint that you should be able to choose everything you want to pay for will never work. A sizable portion of the population will decide to pay nothing while still receiving benefits, leading the rest to stop paying.
It's not like you can deposit a nickel for every street light you pass, or every crime prevented by the police. Some services must be paid by everyone if they are to exist at all because their value is not directly tangible.
Education is a good example. You may not go to a school and say "well, I don't go so I shouldn't have to pay for it". Yet you still reap most of the benefits of the rest of the population being able to read and write. If most of the population couldn't read or write the affect on GDP and job availability would be terrible and definitely effect you directly. The value is provided to some extent to everyone in society. The only way to avoid any personal benefit is to live isolated from the rest of society in the middle of nowhere.
Another clear example is government provided healthcare for infectious diseases. The government does a lot of vaccinations and it's impossible to avoid benefitting from that without cutting off all interaction with other humans. You directly benefit from others being vaccinated by having a lower personal risk of getting infected.
I think your view is too narrow and focuses on transactional exchanges, like buying gas or paying a toll. But it doesn't capture the larger benefit to everyone including yourself for things like having less criminals, illiterate people, and junkies running around. Which is the societal benefit to a lot of government programs and why everyone is expected to pay for them.
Your idea of not paying for services you don't use falls apart when considering that many of these services directly benefit you even if you don't directly consume them. And the only way to avoid the benefits is to avoid society completely.