All our labor, however skilled, is a social product, a joint production of the labors of countless others such as teachers, farmers and city employees. They build and maintain the environment or infrastructure without which our own work would be impossible.
The self-made individual touted by Randian individualists is a fiction, a distortion. People who believe in this fiction suffer from what we can call Trumpism.
Donald Trump is the perfect symbol of the craziness of individualism. His brief candidacy collapsed as he was laughed off the political stage. Because of his ridiculous self-importance and exaggerated sense of power, people quickly saw him as a clown.
Trumpism makes Americans tolerant of extreme inequality in wealth and income. The top 5% owned 62% of the nation's wealth in 2007. Trumpists would say that these numbers reflect the immensely greater individual contributions of the very rich.
Finally, it's simply false to say that there are only private goods, and the only legitimate function of government is to protect them. The society that makes our individual lives possible has many important and essentially public goods.
These include infrastructure, education, a clean environment, social insurance, and basic scientific research of the sort that created the internet and will launch nanotechnology. These public goods empower and liberate our individual lives.
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