4 ms·

> I similarly dislike the idea that someone else could, in any capacity, have the power to decide for me how I am going to live my life .... Except that your d

• vinceguidry 12y ago
  I don't understand this position. Individualism has given us everything we have as a modern society. Someone had to build the roads, someone had to build the manufacturing pipelines, someone had to build the distribution networks, someone had to build X, and that X was built by someone hoping to get rich doing so, and that someone did, deservedly. Capitalism is the only thing that's really capable of lifting people out of poverty. We need to work with people's selfish desires, not against them.
  • steveax 12y ago
    Rubbish. Individualism did not build the interstate highway system, or sewer systems or even the internet. Please put down Atlas Shrugged long enough to take a look around you.
    • jordanthoms 12y ago
      Yeah, but what paid for that to be built? Taxes collected from individuals who succeeded.
      • alchemism 12y ago
        Actually the people who do not succeed (the lower-to-middle classes) pay far more in income taxes than the paltry capital gains taxes of the ultra-successful.
        • wooter 12y ago
          the top 10% pay 70% or so of all income taxes.. the top 20, 90%
          • tormeh 12y ago
            Yeah, but the money is taken from the lower class and given to the overclass by the government through property rights and similar laws. Who pays how much for the common good is an uninteresting question, as money is simply resource allocation by the government/the-powers-that-be.
    • vinceguidry 12y ago
      The Internet wasn't built by private companies? Are you kidding? ARPANET might have been built by the DOD, but the Internet we use today is 100% built and owned by private companies.
      • nmrm 12y ago
        > is 100% built and owned by private companies. You left off the part where de facto government granted monopolies helped build the capital base and in many cases directly funded infrastructure investments.
• orangecat 12y ago
  So exactly what life decisions should we not be permitted to make without permission from the collective? Where to live, what career to pursue, who to have children with?
  • techsupporter 12y ago
    That's a knee-jerk reaction and you know it. The answer is what it has always been: We, as a society, will figure it out as we go along. Right now, the collective says you can't drive over a certain speed, you can't build particular buildings in particular locations, you can't operate on people without training, you can't smoke indoors in several small pockets of society, you can't just broadcast RF at certain frequencies, and so on. No, we don't have central economic planning to the level of detail you sarcastically ask, nor do we have sociological planning like that (though, I do note, that arranged/forced marriages and the accompanying acts of procreation _were_ considered reasonable for hundreds of years). Being told "no" by society doesn't imply any status of rightness or wrongness, nor is it a reason to get all petulant and start asking "illogically-extending-the-argument" questions.
    • orangecat 12y ago
      If I'm parsing that correctly without the gratuitous insults, it would be "yes, society has the moral authority to dictate every aspect of your life, but it will probably leave you some degree of freedom, so quit complaining". I profoundly disagree, but I'll leave it at that.
  • michaelcampbell 12y ago
    A quick Googling of the laws of your town, county, state, and country (or your equivalents thereof) would be one place to start looking up that very list.
  • eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    I would think society validly has a say in your usage of zero-sum positional goods.
  • alchemism 12y ago