Why do you have to pay for road maintenance in your whole town, if the only streets you drive on go to your job and the mall? Because roads aren't a bunch of s

Why do you have to pay for road maintenance in your whole town, if the only streets you drive on go to your job and the mall? Because roads aren't a bunch of separate things you pay for and benefit from individually, they are one thing ("the roads") that you pay for collectively and benefit from as a whole. Living in a town with good roads improves your life in all sorts of subtle ways that more than offset the short-sighted savings you'd see from refusing to fix potholes on streets you never visit. Same deal with the internet. When you pay your broadband bill, you're not just paying for the cables and routers between your house and Facebook, you're paying for the maintenance of "the internet", a collective thing which benefits you indirectly even if you don't visit most of it. And using an internet that prioritizes the routes to Facebook and Youtube would be a lot like living in a town where the only good roads lead to your job and the mall.