The US is built on a fundamental distrust of mainstream authority. Our founders were religious radicals who thrived as long as they were exiled someplace where they couldn't affect anybody who mattered. Our folk heroes are dimwitted-but-clever rebels who defeat all the experts with old-fashioned know-how. The Russians sent men to space essentially as cargo for the mathematicians back on Earth to work out; we sent seat-of-your-pants pilots, and arguably our most memorable space mission was the one that got screwed up until our team improvised their way to victory. We proudly pay cash to lawn-mowers and restaurant servers we like so they can hide it from the taxman. So given all that, why would we ever meekly hand our humanity, our free will, to the bureaucrats in the police department or hospitals, just so that they can abuse it more efficiently?

You don't get to declare by fiat what constitutes a society, or what counts as "taking care of its own". Nor do you get to just help yourself to the assumption that other countries, which claim to have things like "a public healthcare system" and "police who have a duty to save you", actually have those things.

As for "well documented", if you believe what the media tells you about anything, let alone the US, you are in no position to judge anyone else.

As for "confirmed and defended", since it's impossible to have a government that actually does the things you claim, of course I can "confirm" that the US doesn't. And of course I'll defend freedom, particularly when that means explaining what freedom actually means to people who don't understand it.

I don't mean to apologize for some of the awful things that go on in the United States, but your comment seems to come from the point of view of someone whose understanding of the country is built on popular media and clickbait headlines, rather than first-hand experience, if I may be so bold.

Keep in mind that what gets reported on and popularized is what sells clicks/views/etc, and is not very representative of "normal life."

It's true that services and norms vary widely across the different states, and in that sense perhaps there is not a "society" so much as "a patchwork of societies, not always working together." But I don't think it's quite the black-and-white either/or question that seems to be argued in this thread.

By your definition, no "society" existed in the entire world until the 20th century.

German here. We do have a public healthcare system. That we can opt out of and go private. The trade-off is it being increasingly hard to get back into the public one, especially as people get older and thus more "expensive".

Insurances (including fire service or roadside assistance) has to be payed. You cannot just opt back into it once you need it. If parent is right and they had chances to opt into fire service but decided not to, you cannot just bill them for a single instance. Otherwise they're behavior would be reward, and everyone else had incentive to do the same.

> Do they have police who have a duty to save you? Nope. That alone is just an absolute shit show. What sort of country says the police have no obligation to protect you? Only to show up and solve the crime once it's happened? What sort of society doesn't look after it's own?

What country puts that kind of positive obligation on the police? I'm not aware of any that do.