I would call them cultists at this point.
I wish we could just have a sensible grown up discussion about which services are best delivered by the private sector and which by the public sector - there are plenty of both!
The point is, we need stories to order our world and draw us together…
Whatever the populus via government decides that to be.
Personally I agree with you, I think privatizing any of those things would be madness, because the real world never ends up working like the ideological fantasy, but it's hard to get everyone to agree on what's an objective economic truth.
That's just silly, we've had the anarcho-capitalists perspective in the past, that's how the modern firefighting services were started.
Do you know how they'd work?
Firefighters would come up to your house and ask for half of what was inside in order to extinguish the fire, because there's no free market for desperate people.
Ooooor... they'd do the same to your neighbors, because if they wouldn't extinguish your fire, their house could burn down, too.
Ooooor... they'd set stuff on fire so that they'd have who to blackmail.
Ooooor... you could pay them a constant insurance/protection fee so that they'd actually help. And that insurance/protection fee would become widespread, because who wants their house to burn down?
At which point, why not just distribute the cost to everyone since 99.999% of buildings can burn down, and make it a public service?
Which is where we are now.
Anarcho-capitalists and libertarians are basically people who don't know history and would want to speedrun it with great pain and suffering for everyone, along the way.
It's important to be realistic here and not fall back to technical truths. Yes, you could technically buy a house with physical cash. In practice, you need a bank account and to deal with the private banking system.
Another important factor for me is whether choice reasonably exists in the market. One of the great things about having a private sector is I can choose where to allocate my funds. I'm quite into music so naturally I have more instruments and sound equipment than most. But to afford this I must sacrifice other areas, like fishing. I don't own any fishing equipment because I'm not into fishing. This is great because it allows for a rich and diverse society.
But when the doctor says you need a £3000 procedure or else you will die, nobody chooses instead to allocate the funds elsewhere. There is no reasonable choice when it comes to healthcare. So it's wrong to treat it just like fishing.