Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One reason that Europe has very few innovative new companies created in the last 25 years is that everyone is at the coffee shop writing poetry. This does not dispute the central point of the quoted piece, which is that the quality of life of most Americans is very poor contrast to that of the average person in some subset of European countries. I would wager that most coffee shop employees are more concerned with…
Americans don't believe the onus is on the whole to make sure the individual lives a happy life. We just don't have the collectivist culture the Europeans have. I think this is a great thing, and is why America is where most of the innovation, cultural, and political power is. I personally have lower taxes, high quality healthcare, and live in an awesome location, and I got all of that through an education and traini…
Due to the overwhelming amount of memoirs and op-ed's and other things of the like that exist in abundance, I will refrain from giving example circumstances that prevent people from taking such “obvious” poverty relinquishing actions, such as education, and “workharder-ness.”
Not trying to be rude here but "the morally right thing...(is to) make a better future for YOU" is really laughable honestly. I am not broadly traveled but this sort of sentiment seems uniquely American. A land where even the idea of community is a bad word that stings with thoughts of dependence. Where self-sufficiency and lack of illness are the greatest things to behold, in much the same way that we measure the quality of chattel (be that farm animal, slave, or inanimate property).
I have had more than one conversation with some supposed Ayn Rand [1] touting "ideologist", that seemed to have no inkling of anything that was per-provided for their meager successes. Such as, an entrepreneur who started with no small sum of money provided by a parent, that did not believe an any sort of government regulation, other than ones that hold his employees to mythical slavery contracts he dreamed up in his spare time. Not willing to even except that food practices were made safer but some regulatory concerns, because of course there is no such thing as germs anyway(including all sickness which was simply a lie to get out of working hard). A friend of mine installs captioned phones for people who have lost their hearing, and even though he is required to explain as well as have them accept a contract that specifically states it is a government program at no cost to them, they still confide in him with their fears of socialist uprisings. In fact, I hardly meet a person with even an appreciation for the roads they rode in on. Much less the horse, that seems to brandish itself at the mere existence of their will to travel and an ability to procure a loan.
I’m not only suggesting that we should be a little more aware of the benefits that so many of us have been given from the past, but also that we not cheapen ourselves by only valuing self-reliance. We may have a system in which individuals can live in an imagined state of “I’ve done all of this by the sweat of my own brow,” but this is only imagined, and our souls are weaker for it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_trilemma
[1] Not intended to denounce Rand, only pointing out a trend.