There are entire enterprises that operate by this principle. Private Insurance comes to mind first. The problem with insurance and with this philosophy in gener

There are entire enterprises that operate by this principle. Private Insurance comes to mind first. The problem with insurance and with this philosophy in general is that there are a lot of catestrophic situations you can find yourself in for which you would likely purchase no insurance because you can't ever see yourself being there. The reason government steps in in cases like loss of job and provision of welfare is because nobody ever expects to be in those situations. But when you end up in those situations, having not bought insurance prior to being there, you will naturally find them pernicious. In order to prevent that from happening, government programs provide a kind of nationwide or statewide insurance policy that you are bought into by default just in case you should happen to need it some day. You're arguing that you never will, and that might be the case, but that's also strictly speaking a risky proposition if aggregated over the entire population of the US.