You're forced to use the roads. There is no practical way around government services since they're so pervasive. Just because someone benefited from a government service does not make it morally justifiable to steal.
I think you're missing the point some of the earlier posters were trying to make.
It's difficult to justify taxation by saying that it's spent on public services that everyone uses if you can't also demonstrate that the same money spent voluntarily by the taxpayer on private provision of the same services couldn't have achieved the same or better results. The provision-of-services argument alone doesn't allow for the opportunity cost of all that tax money.
However, if the government is the only provider of a service and doesn't allow for private competition, as is often the case with the kinds of service being mentioned in this thread depending on where in the world you are and what your system of government is, then clearly it's difficult or even impossible to measure how well private competition would have done instead. Some cases of large-scale privatisation of important services have worked very well, yet other cases have failed horribly, so there's no obvious, black-and-white case for whether tax-funded public services are better or worse than privately funded commercial ones.
For air and water at least it's not a 'provision of services' argument.
Those are shared resources and as such require a way to ensure that assholes don't ruin it for everyone. I mean, right? We can't even make safe concurrent algorithms for a single computer where we control all the code without using primitives like CAS, locks, etc. Whether it's the guy with the largest club or government as we know it, that control of shared resources is done by government by definition.
Without control of those shared resources it's uneconomical to re-clean the air or water sufficient to provide for it.
Additionally even if private companies can do it cheaper that may not be better overall. What would the poor do if there were no sources of clean water? Would they just sit there and die? Or would they gang up and take it by force from those who can afford it?
People pay these costs all the time, whether they realize it or not.
More importantly, people often require services in the future that they refuse to plan for ahead of time, which wouldn't be a big deal except for when their failure to plan starts to affect other people.
For example, you can let a house burn down out in the sticks if someone doesn't pay into a fire-fighting fund (whether public or private).
In a city it is simply unacceptable to let a building burn; it would catch the buildings around it on fire. Those residents have to contribute whether they think it's a good idea or not.
I mean shit, I wish it were as easy to have a functioning and vibrant society as simply blaming the government for everything but people always seem to miss that they'd simply end up subservient to whoever the next despot is who decided to wield force. As long as you live in a world with other people you are never completely free of politics or government; someone will always have a bigger club than the other and so you can either deal with the world as it is or fall prey to those with less idealistic principles.
Right, so in the cases you're talking about there, you have made some sort of argument that government is necessary and therefore needs to be funded. However, I can't help noticing that everything you described there collectively represents a tiny drop in the ocean of what a lot of governments do, and the total cost represents a similarly tiny drop in the ocean of the tax those governments charge everyone to fund themselves. Making an analogous case for many other, much more expensive government activities is not so easy: medical care, education, personal security, provisions for the elderly, energy production, housing, all these have been provided effectively as a public service, a private enterprise, or some hybrid.
