Idk if that is a valid criticism. Libertarian types recognize opportunities and take them with purpose to better their lives. They don’t wait around for miracles. God opens a door and they walk through it. They appreciate the roads and stuff along the way. Obama’s you didn’t build that stuff was a knock on them, but he misses their point or deliberately misconstrued it because he was an elitist wanker.
Strong public education and health systems can help all types of people to realize their potential (and stay healthy).
Libertarians are among the last people I’d count on to maintain these parts of society.
Guy
My instincts lean libertarian (because fuck you, I got mine? maybe?). But libertarian politicians 1) tend to be not so pragmatic, 2) are too often bat shit crazy, and 3) are really just fronting for corporate interests.
I think people mistake anarchism for libertarianism. As a libertarian I also think many otherwise intractable problems would be solved by recognizing natural resources necessary for life as a birthright rather than as prizes to make the few wealthy. If there were no land lords, or arable land lords, or water lords, or fossil fuel lords for example everyone would be born rich, equal owners of a nation’s natural resources. OTOH wealth created by individuals would be taxed at a perpetual maximum rate of 10% because it would no longer have to single-handedly support the 50% of the population that pays no taxes.
I thought the exact same thing actually. Shoveling sledge off the factory floor and throwing it into our ground meat.
The libertarian argument would be “well the free market will fix that because people will stop buying it.”. Sure if they ever figure it out or after a few hundred people die. If they can kill you slowly like cigarettes though, then profiteering off of killing people can go on indefinitely.
You know he was talking about like roads and the infrastructure built by govt funding that allows business to thrive right? You didn’t build the roads and yet you benefit from it. If libertarians were in charge roads would all be privatized.
So you want to nationalize all of these? That doesn’t sound libertarian.
I’m talking about something fundamentally different. Instead of the state owning the natural resources or wealthy individuals scooping them up I’m talking about a corporation in which all citizens are shareholders as a birthright. Every shareholder would receive dividend payments derived from natural resources that now go to the wealthy few. Individuals would own the natural resources they needed to sustain their life but no one could own more natural resources such as land than they needed. The guiding principal would be that natural resources exist to sustain life,not to make the few wealthy.
so communism?
Each individual owns a share so technically you have collective ownership. But you couldn’t possibly run a corporation with millions of shareholders making daily decisions, so you’d need a board/leadership to manage the resources, or effectively control them. So you end up with the ending of Animal Farm. In other words… Communism.
Communism is when the state owns all natural and Human Resources. Capitalism is when the wealthy few own all the natural resources. It’s a failure of imagination to be unable to imagine something between the two in which individuals own, as a birthright, the natural resources they need to sustain life and no more.
In such a world there would be no landlords, no commissars, no renters. Imagine what life would be like in Taiwan for example if you could only own the living space/land you needed and no more.
If I can’t sell it I don’t really own it.
What we have here is a failure of imagination. If you own it, you can sell it and buy another. Just what you need though.
It’s not a failure of imagination, I’m literally trying to imagine how this will work. So you can trade it. That’s good, but you can’t sell it to get money for something else you need for example. The government will have to manage all this. It doesn’t sound fundamentally different from government ownership.
Thank god for divided government.
communism is communal ownership and control of resources. this is different than everyone with a birthright (and presumably a say in control), how?
you should come up with a cool tagline for that. something like to each according to his need. just spit balling here. 
Might be a time for those who screamed till they were blue in the face for a democrat House a democrat Senate and a democrat Presidency to ask, after 2 years, how did they do?
Are peoples lives better? Is the world a better and safer place?
But things would have been even worse under the Republicans… 
Stop it, you! I was waiting for one of the others to make that argument. 
I suspect they would be coasting off the use of such public resources while claiming that it’s all about the individual.
Not so far off from the current political right, really.
Guy