To want a society where we just pay for ourselves

[LettingTheBadThingsGo]

Okay this is going to get some backs up but it's also how I feel so..
I wish we could just live in a society where we all just pay for ourselves.
So you want to have children - you pay for it all yourself. No benefits of any kind.
You want to see a GP - You pay a fee and get the service
You need the police - You pay a fee and get the service
You want education for your kids - you pay for it and get to choose where to send them

Nobody gets a pension or any benefits. However we all know this and as such we pay no tax/NI and save for ourselves.

Obviously there would have to be a phased input over a large number of years (like 30)

I want to know that if I need the police I can get them here in 5 mins. If I need an ambulance I want to know I can get it here in 5 mins. I don't want to not have these services because there is a rubbish 'free' service because there is not enough being allocated to them because it's all being spent on things I disagree with (welfare, council houses)

This would make everyone responsible for themselves. Those who work hard would be better off. Those who don't work will be worse off. Seems fair to me.

Everyone would save from day 1 in case they become ill or disabled and need to support themselves or have a disabled child (although they could choose not to have children in the first place).

I find it very weird that we live in a capitalist society where so many people are being supported by welfare. To me that is the opposite of a capitalist society.

Obviously there are some things that could never be allocated to each person such as defence of the country. There would have to still be a 'country charge' to every person to cover things that just could not be split. Street lighting would probably have to come under this as well. However roads could be covered by a charge to each person based on their mileage each year.

Yes it would take lots of thought and as I said would have to be implemented over a large number of years. However this would lead to a more productive society as well as better services. Obviously on the basis of a thread I haven't thought everything out but hopefully you all get the idea.

Anybody who didn't want to live like that could leave of course and live somewhere else.

So anyone else agree - no tax or ni - save and pay for yourself. Just pay a 'country charge' to cover things that can't be allocated like defence of country. Everything else is private (healthcare, police, pensions) and you save for it all yourself.

The only people who I can imagine not wanting this is those that live on the hard work of others ie life time welfare claimants. For everyone else surely they would be better off.

Beautifully put- having lived in Denmark 2020 to 2022 ( and it’s similar in Sweden) they have stifflegislation strong social underpinning Tons of capitalism and high tax -much higher than here but you get a fair bit for it - no council tax, cheap and good childcare that doesn’t drop off a cliff once you get to a certain earnings level- it’s fixed, much more social housing , a lot of it pretty nice. They have the underpinning in place that expects that couples both work if able to do so, lots of breakfast clubs, afterschool etc (they tend to start earlier and finish earlier too) I was told benefits aren’t that generous , not higher than UKs - you saw far less disability and hugely obese people about too- can’t say why that is but it was definitely the case. It’s a different mindset and not one I think many people here would go for- the Daily Mail /Express etc would go nuts if you suddenly said basic tax 42-46% but when you factor in they don’t pay NI, council tax, can get childcare at £280 a month even for young children, have free health , lots of social housing , slightly better state pension, overall there is little in it - especially when you factor in far fewer are claiming , needing UC top ups, high private rents needing to be covered off at least in part for many,

I think we have things arse about face here and I think it’s too far gone for anyone to change it - too many people who would think ‘I don’t need cheap childcare, don’t need social housing , not bothered about good infrastructure , investment in green energy ( Denmarks is very high, some days almost self sufficient) - I don’t want to pay 42% tax, especially people not paying NI at the moment either through not working or over 67 and retired or early retired and living off savings/private pensions) and that is the issue -

@LettingTheBadThingsGo

Hopefully you will now understand from the other posts why your proposals for everyone to pay for themselves wouldn't work.

To respond to your other points:

For example how many people are watching their bright, clever children have a rubbish education because they are in a class too big which is being disrupted constantly by sen children.

It isn't likely to be "sen children" disrupting lessons, ime, it is more likely to be NT children who are completely out of control because of various factors - not enough parenting, too much explicit violence in books and games having traumatised them, not enough of the right kind of supervision at school, inadequate education from a young age, no motivation, causing the disruption at school.

By having a small education budget nobody seems to be getting a good education anymore (unless they pay to send their kids privately.) So who is benefitting in this education system paid for by the state/taxpayer. Parents of sen kids are writing threads constantly saying their child is not getting the right treatment. Parents of bright children are writing threads saying they are sick of their kids education being disrupted by the sen kids. The teachers are run ragged and quitting. All this because the needs of the system far outweigh the money we have to run it.

Education was done a lot better in the past with less money and is currently ridiculously mismanaged. The issue is not that we should not collectively pay for education via taxes, more that tax payers money is currently being used unwisely, to put it mildly.

So the answer is to give more money to education and hire more teachers and have smaller classes perhaps splitting children into bright, average and disabled. That sounds great except the country can't afford to allocate more to education because of all the other demands on it.

No, it is because public money is being used unwisely in all sorts of areas, most notably public private partnerships that do not fulfil needs and which are an immoral waste of public money, and money available to education is being used unwisely, and that policies around education are very badly thought out.

The same argument could be applied to healthcare and no doubt lots of areas of spending.

My points apply there too.

Can we all at least acknowledge that the current way of doing things is not working.

Yes but your solutions are not good or workable solutions

Everyone above a certain threshold pays tax! Tax is paid proportionately, not on a use by basis.

I think you should visit some developing nations and see a closer real life version of what you dream of.

Leaving the weak and vulnerable in society to suffer is not civilisation.

Although I think some benefits do need a rethink.

A scary thought - the world would end up with bonkers billionaires having loads of kids because they can afford them and normal decent, working people not have any because they can't... oh wait.... we're already there.

I always say this on these types of posts - so many people want Dubai levels of tax and Scandinavian services- the moon on a stick comes to mind

This sounds like one of those ideas you have when you’re completely drunk and you think you’ve fixed the world. Then you wake up the next morning thinking, what on earth was I thinking and how did I ever think that was a good idea?

But what if no one else needs an ambulance? No income would mean the ambulance drivers and paramedics go and do something else and aren't there anymore for when you need them. Not in 5 minutes, not in 5 hours.
I used to live in a zero crime area. If your system came into being, that would mean there were no police in that area, because no one was paying to support them.

I think you were born in the wrong era OP. In 100 years I can see these things happening, with dipping birth rates there will only be a quarter of the population and it will be every person for themselves.

This thing about the police/ambulance and I'm assuming the fire brigade, are you proposing some kind of subscription service, or would they be billed afterwards? If it's a subscription, what if people never have to use any of the services, would they get a refund?

In the event someone's house burns down and they've lost all of their possessions, will they have to pay the emergency services for attending as well as somehow finding money to find somewhere new to live? Will insurance be allowed in this new system of yours?

But, there is an interesting satirical musical called Urinetown (I promise I’m not a troll, it’s real) which explores the impact on society where people have to pay to use the loo, the ultimate capitalism if you like. Without giving too many spoilers I believe it leads to revolution and societal collapse.

The Roman Emperor* Vespasian *did that - his son complained and he famously held up a coin and said does this stink. Urine was used heavily in washing and tanning trades at the time.

The roman empire - which was more unstable than many modern people realise- usually sat at mathematical point of economic disparity between groups possible in a society before revolution- and they also had slaves to prop that system up. But it meant - bread and circuss were cheap in Rome to stop rebellions things like innovation were stifled. Marcus Egnatius Rufus who funded Rome's first free public firefighting force ( out of his own pocket around 22 BCE - was killed byEmperor Augustus because of it. Meant Rome was regularly burning down generations later.

Which charity will you donate your state pension to, who paid your uni fees, did you donate covid related , fuel and any other benefit payments to the homeless

So would you like a thread on the ultimate consequences of a left wing utopia?

People not having children because they pay tax for other unrelated people to have children. People living in tiny rooms because they pay tax to allow other people to live in big houses. People queuing forever for health care appointments because they pay tax for other people to have the appointments first. People pay for training for jobs they will never get because other people get prioritised.

Neither extreme is good.
But where the UK is at the moment is not good. Many people are just trying to stay afloat and feeling like they're drowning.

Yeah defo agree OP. Only rich people should be able to access services they need or want. If others can't afford it who cares? Not our problem. 🙄

Agreed (depending on who we think the true anarchists are)! Anarchism can be a fairly compassionate (if completely unworkable) political position - some people get there from the left and some from the right. But at its core, and in it's Aristotelian origins, it's the belief that we shouldn't have a government/state and that people should simply pursue their own interests - and that's exactly the proposal here. It's just that some anarchists have a more expansive and compassionate idea of what's in their own interests than the OP.

To the OP: you say no one would die in the street unless they chose to. Even granting that not being able to afford hospital could be seen as a choice: in your lovely utopia, who disposes of the rotting corpse once they've made that choice?

Hahaha. Are you going to fund your own defense and security operations aswell OP?!

I really think this is very individual - my friends son at 13 is at the local mixed comp and has no complaints, admittedly it’s a good area generally - but you can’t generalise - my son went to a mid level comp in Oxford and did fine , he also went to a reasonable boarding school for 2 years - I don’t think he did any better academically at the boarding school because he was always a lazy arse academically ( and at 28 he would admit it) regardless of where he went -

In more than a few countries today, disabled babies are abandoned or left to die because their parents know they won't be able to afford to take care of them.

Not something I would want to see brought back to the UK.

My favourite Alan Bennett quote: "we tried to create a small anarchist society but no-one would obey the rules"

If the current system is underfunded, whilst benefiting from economies of scale, how do you think we'll be able to afford this better system from tax savings alone?

Doesn't really matter the reason. There's just a lot of wealthy people (and you sound fairly well off) leaving and few arriving.

That is obviously damaging to the UK public finances.

My prescription for that being reversed is for the UK to be a tolerant fair country attractive to business with generally lower taxes and a smaller than current public sector.

I hate Reform too but I differ from you in that I like Kemi.

Paying for healthcare, emergency services and education centrally has significant benefits to the overall population.

Just as a few examples.

Let’s say emergency services only attend if you pay. We tried that with fire services when they were first set up & what basically happened is some houses were not covered and left to burn. By the time a house that was covered was alight half the street was on fire and in the end none of the houses were saved.

Basically it creates unnecessary additional risk for everyone & the same would apply if you only have police attend if you pay really. Lots more criminals on the streets & only caught after they have hurt or robbed more people since we only start trying to do anything about them once someone pays. Also what gets prioritised? Is it theft because someone pays to have that investigated while child molestation, murder, rape and domestic abuse are quietly ignored if the victims have no money?

Then education. Some people get a really great one as their parents were wealthy and others whose parents were poor for whatever reason (parents died or had an accident and lacked sufficient funds to educate, were a child conceived in rape whose mum couldn’t afford treatment for an abortion, had parents who were just unwilling to pay or couldn’t absorb big price rises at some point, there would be so many possibilities) get no education at all.
Now we want nurses and care workers and police and firemen and mechanics and plasterers and all sorts beside but there are hardly any available because so many children never had a basic education or learned to learn. Lots of them probably aren’t fit and well enough to work anyway or died in childhood because . . .

we have no public health services - no immunisations, public health education programmes, hospital care for unexpected and expensive childhood illnesses (not to mention huge amounts of squalor in areas where the poor reside where they are quite possibly not able to pay for refuse collection, street cleaning etc as 100% of their money is absorbed on survival.

You’ve already said yourself you’d need a country charge for some things like defence or street lighting and you’d be charged for roads based on your usage. Want to maybe stretch to providing some core health/education/ emergency services out of the country charge based on some of these examples too? Congratulations OP you’ve just reinvented this thing we have called taxation. You really worked in finance? I mean I do now and if anyone I was interviewing came up with this I’d be seriously questioning their critical thinking skills. It’s so oversimplified and staggeringly naive it makes me really question if it is genuine because you are describing a dystopian nightmare rather than some viable alternative society

Of all your posts, this one really typifies your utter stupidity.

You had previously said people would pay the costs out of Insurance, so you share the risk of being bankrupt and/or dead from a heath incident, knowing that if you need it you will be looked after, but accepting the risk of those lazy people who chose to have heart attacks and cancer.

But that’s why you pay tax and National Insurance. We pool those risks/costs at a national level. That’s why your proposal isn’t even internally coherent.
It’s a stupid incoherent unthought mess from a … you.

Leaving asie democracy. People like you were in power for long enough and then got rightfully kicked out on the town of our boot. Your bright ideas were the rule and there have been revolutions to end it.

A person who has a child born disabled (bearing in mind it was their own free choice to have children in the first place) would have large savings from paying no tax/ni and thus would pay for and look after their own child.

I come from a working class background and initially did basic office work - usually with an evening job to make ends meet. In my mid 20’s I went to university I graduated at 30 and started a grad job and bought a house (with my now husband). Three years later we had our first child.

that’s the background to demonstrate that we didn’t have the chance to build up significant savings before starting a family and wouldn’t have been able to even if there was no tax and ni.

2 of our children are disabled so I didn’t work for much of their childhood. A very conservative estimate of lost earnings would be about £400k with the associated loss of pensions etc

My children will never be able to “take care of themselves” financially or physically and even if we had been able to pay for everything (education, healthcare etc) what would happen to them (and others like them) when we die. Are they cast aside to die on the street? Seriously, what sort of person thinks that’s ok!?

Why should a child’s life chances be entirely dependent on their parents ability to pay for their education and healthcare (even more so than it is now?). With no tax how is the justice system funded, how are we protected from criminals (or how is the prison system funded)? How are social services funded or do we not care about the children who are being neglected or abused?

OP you either have zero critical thinking skills or are a sociopath!

@LettingTheBadThingsGo Who is funding these services to be available in the first place though? Paying to use these services on an as need basis is not going to fund the education, training, equipment etc needed for them to be available for you to use.