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.

🙄
There really is no point in continuing this discussion.

In your society people would stop having children for fear of them being born disabled or becoming disabled, this would cause a huge deduction in the population, resulting in a time where you'd have the money to pay for everything l, but no one to do it, a ambulance or police would now take much longer then 5 minutes because they don't have enough working age people

So, when I’m being stabbed to death…will there be an option on 999 to input my card details;

Press 1 if you’d like a Police Officer on a motorbike…wait 3 hours

Press 2 if you’d like two Police Officers in a patrol car…wait 2 hours

Press 3 if you’d like our premium service…three Police officers, in under an hour with a pre-prepared TikTok dance 💃 🕺

Shame if it’s just before payday.

This seems to be quite a reactive society. I wouldn’t like it one bit. Police only appear once a crime is committed? Who pays for deeper investigations? Preventive measures?
Am I only paying for street lights if I walk out at night? Or do we all forget about street lighting and stay in darkness?
Preventive and community health care measures don’t exist anymore?
are we all equally rich too?

….and the children born should just suffer in your world OP?

Counters to the Shakespeare Argument

No historical proof: No records exist proving Shakespeare ever attended King’s New School in Stratford.

Self-taught genius: Even if he attended, he left around age 14 and never went to university.

The "Question": Entire scholarly movements (Baconian, Oxfordian) argue a grammar school education was insufficient to write his works.

Flawed system: Elizabethan grammar schools relied on brutal rote memorization, not the creative thinking Shakespeare mastered.

Counters to the Socrates Argument

Anti-institutional stance: Socrates openly despised the Sophists, the professional, paid educators of his era.

Dialogue over lectures: He championed the Socratic Method, which relies on cooperative conversation, not rigid classrooms.

No written curriculum: Socrates never wrote anything down or established a formal curriculum.

Execution by the state: The formal democratic institutions of Athens literally executed him for "corrupting the youth" with independent thought.

You seem a bit of a prize prick to be honest and id bet money you're completely unpleasant to be around .

Except it wasn't free then. It was a great expense reserved only for the wealthy elites. Every person you've listed is male and came from a very wealthy background.

but how do you think that stoped people having children in historic times ? they still had them then,

@PenelopeJoanSterling Unfortunately, we're not all born with Da Vinci's brain.

I have ChatGPT too, I tend not to use it for MN debates, though, on account of quite enjoying having oceans/rivers/the ozone layer...

Lack of contraception.
Babies left to die on rubbish tips.

Hopefully the op has went for a lie down.....

i used google, because it was faster than my reading and its more accurate than chat. although i do like chat at times, but grok can be better

You really don’t get that your world will bring violence to your door? Rebellion and unrest?

Fair taxes mean people pay as they are able for decent and secure society…that HUGELY benefits them

Maybe you should consider minimum income guarantee instead ?

Do you realise that the treatments for some illnesses can run into hundreds of thousands of pounds or even more. Only the super rich would be able to pay enough to cure themselves. How can you want that??

Enough people here have said similar things but just to echo them:

you’re saying people should only have children if they can afford for the worst case scenario of a lifelong heavily disabled child; presumably enough money to pay for their full time residential care for life? That’s roughly £80k a year care before any medical treatment, say the child lives until 70. That’s 7 million to just pay for your disabled child’s lifetime care. Under your logic the parents would also need enough money for their own medical care/ police etc. So by your logic only multi millionaires should have children? Surely you can see the issue that would then pose in society when birth rates drop to an estimated 2% of the population?

And that’s before you consider other scenarios like all your family being in a horrific car crash and you only being able to afford the treatment for some of you at once, or you and your spouse getting cancer in quick succession.

If you’d be comfortable with police, fire and ambulance services charging for callouts then would you be comfortable with them responding fastest to the highest bidder? Money is king in your world so presumably you would be happy for the Police to respond first to someone that can pay more than you?

You can argue that for all these services people could pay an insurance premium for each, but then…that’s what national insurance is…

There are countless other examples we could cover, but I think overall it’s evident that you live a fairly charmed life if you can’t imagine the many scenarios in which your system would fall down.

The education system has failed you, OP. Try reading a book or two. And don’t limit yourself to Ayn Rand.

i think my point is, we dont need the Victorian style education system, just to teach society different topics

I don’t think I get nothing for my taxes OP …you seem to want to live in hell, I don’t

Under @LettingTheBadThingsGo system Ian Watkins would be alive, living in the society and still raping children and babies.

Justice wouldn’t just be the cost of the police, CPS, courts etc, they would have to pay for the person to be punished, so the victim would be funding the probation service, prisons etc.

Under @LettingTheBadThingsGo system Ian Watkins would be alive, living in the society and still raping children and babies.

Justice wouldn’t just be the cost of the police, CPS, courts etc, they would have to pay for the person to be punished, so the victim would be funding the probation service, prisons etc.

@PenelopeJoanSterling Which system would you propose that would benefit all?

And you are free to live your education free life elsewhere.

Can you explain this one @LettingTheBadThingsGo?

Where does the bank of money come from, you said there were no benefits?

If a child is born with a disability that means they're unable to work in adulthood, where does their money to live on come from? How do they pay when the need assistance such as police or ambulance? Or do we go back to the bung them all in workhouses days?