Also, does your walker friend want the people she deals with, at her bank, insurance company, brokerage, utilities, and law enforcement office to be literate and able to work with numbers? What about the people who run the local nuclear power plant, and the people who fly the planes? The people who designed and put together her car? The people who designed her electrical system? Does she want them to be able to read, write, and think, or does she want people who've never had any schooling to do those things? 'Cause we could probably outsource those to some people in India or Africa, in parts where they have no free public schooling, to do all those things. Or hey! We could just not fund our schools! Does it advantage her in any way to have educated people doing all the things that make her life easier, by any chance?
This shouldn't-have-to-pay mentality is running rampant these days and is taking apart our community and democracy. The real way to decide you shouldn't have to pay is to elect officials who will look into defunding what you don't approve of funding. The bad way is to try to assign everyone different costs instead of pitching in together. So people who never leave town wouldn't pay anything toward the national highway system. (Except wait, do they use any goods delivered from afar?) People who never go out at night wouldn't pay toward the streetlights. People who don't care about the air they breathe wouldn't pay toward clean air enforcement. People who don't eat out wouldn't pay towards restaurant cleanliness enforcement. People who own their own houses wouldn't pay towards the enforcement of tenants' or landlords' rights. And so on. Everything would be funded in a minimal, scattershot way. There are a number of third-world countries already effectively on this system. Maybe people who favor this should go see how well it's working there.