> Has anyone ever paid the individual price for an article?

I would be very interested to see statistics on this, because I suspect the answer is "almost nobody" - as I assume your question was meant to imply.

> ... [How] many non-academic taxpayers are trying to read articles that don't have institutional access through their employer or local public library?

Count me in this population, although to be honest it literally never occurred to me to check if the local public library had journal access.