What I've found is that most of the people who whine about high taxes and say that they prefer the American solution fit into one of three categories:
Greedy 'I got mine' Rich Person: They make enough money that the lack of public infrastructure and government support doesn't impact them in a meaningful way and want to hoard as much money as possible, presumably so they can pretend they're Scrooge McDuck and swim in a pile of gold. They don't give a shit about the hoi polloi and despise having to give anything back to the society that enabled their success.
Wannabe Rich Person: They've bought into the lie that all it takes to become super-rich is a bit of hard work and want to be one of the above jack-asses when they get there so they support low taxes and deny the need for government help even though it would benefit them greatly as they are now because they think it'll make things better once they 'make it big'. They don't realize that realistically, you need to be either incredibly lucky or be born into it to get rich enough that lower taxes actually benefit you more than the complete lack of adequate social services that enables such low rates hurts you.
Free Market Drone: Maybe they read a bit too much Ayn Rand. Maybe someone forced them to watch Cold-War era propaganda films for days on end, Clockwork Orange style, perhaps a Marxist molested them as a child. Whatever the reason, this is a true believer. Unlike the other two, this isn't sociopathic self-interest (or the delusion of future such self-interest) but rather a genuine belief that the government is always evil, the market is always right, lower taxes are always better and that completely unfettered markets would lead to anything other than a cyberpunk dystopia.
This is because, for a lot of people, the 'free market' is basically a religion. It lets them be as greedy as they want to be and classify that behavior as good and moral so they refuse to acknowledge that there's any situation where 'running things like a business' isn't the correct solution.
Simple answers are always easier to sell people on than complex ones, even if they're not right, especially if it lets people do what they want to do anyway and feel good about doing it. It doesn't help that we spent most of the 20th Century blasting every with propaganda extolling the virtues of the free market and the evils of socialism.
It's not quite that bad, an electric charge-point takes up a lot less space than a gas pump so that should free up some lot space and since their margins on gas are so low anyway they could probably still make a decent profit off fewer customers who stay there longer as long as they can find things to entice those people into spending money on while they're there.
Further, since there wouldn't be an oil cartel breathing down their neck to meet certain price points they could actually charge as much as the market will bear for electricity and make a bit of profit there as well.
For me at least, the problem isn't that so much is becoming public but that so many little things that shouldn't matter can get you in trouble when they're made public. Smoking some weed, getting drunk, whatever goofy shit you get up to, it shouldn't matter if it's made public, because it shouldn't be anyone's concern but your own what you do with your own body in your own time.
Obviously, if you're getting twisted at work or whatever that's an issue, but victimless fun shouldn't have legal or professional consequences...
Nobody talked about relevance. The word used was bogeyman.
MS is pretty irrelevant these days outside of the enterprise desktop arena.
What was that?
1) Why is OK to throw money down the hole on something that might save lives in a highly unlikely set of circumstances when there are much more pressing issues where that money could definitely be used to save lives, especially given that you seem to have a problem with government spending in general given your sig. Unless you only have a problem with the government spending money when it's on things you don't like?
2) Assuming we actually need to be spending money on this, why do we need lasers in this roll at all given that Nike-Zeus was making contact intercepts on the sort of missiles you're worried about in the 1960s?
3) Assuming we need this sort of system and must use pew-pew lasers to do it why should we be using giant, finicky and expensive chemical lasers when we could be spending that money on solid-state systems instead?
Life is a healthy respect for mother nature laced with greed.