Outdoorsman, attempting to avoid any personal matters in your post, I will chime in and hope not to get flamed out for my position on the items you raise.
Virtually everyone benefits from roads/highways even if they personally never drive or have never been driven on a road as all the goods they consume come in via vehicle driving them in to the stores they are purchased from. The same with schools and police and fire and such, every person benefits from their existence even if they never actually used these services, as the people who they do business with make use of them.
So in that regard, everyone who visits or lives in a waterfront town benefits from quality public docks with sufficient capacity to service its users.
Its not the same as share the wealth by any means, but the concept of shared costs and benefits of public infrastructure has similarities.
And please do not take this to mean I support unlimited spending on public infrastructure, reasonable capacity and other limits need to be carefully assessed, as you will also buy maintenance for these items. Finding a balance between building in extra capacity for reasonable future growth and ending up with excess capacity that very few benefit from can be tricky.
Again, interesting discussion, just wish all such threads didn't become personally insulting battlegrounds.
ATB
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