What you said in this post isn't Randian, but I still maintain the previous rejection of the notion of "common good" is. Freedom is for the common good, as is the rule of law. However, you were referring specifically to collectivist economics so I won't press the point.
I think more of what I should have said was that Individual Rights are more important than Collective Rights. If you are so worried about the collective community, you allow it to remain healthy through individual freedom, not a majority or even elite few imposing its will on others.
Beyond the rhetoric can you actually provide a nation and period of time that proves your point? On a historical basis not a single person you sited lived in a time or place where such a government existed. Out of the four only one of them wasn't heavily invested in slavery.
This isn't a response to you, but I think it's weird that any discussion of this stuff seems to compare a hypothetical libertarian utopia to soviet communism. A theory in practice which perverted the original ideas to a level that included genocide.
That question does come up frequent in conversation like this. The truth is that it has never been that was in the purest sense, but there are points in history were a society/nation was heading that way and there are statistics to show the effects on economies and civil rights.
Like I mentioned in a previous post our founding fathers, most of them were against slavery even though they had slaves themselves. The problem was at the time, their source of income was from farming and at the time there was no way to have a farm without slaves, you couldn't hire people to do that type of work due to the culture. Thomas Jefferson many times tried adding legislation banning slavery and at times tried putting it in the constitution, but at the time state officials had threatened to wage war for their independence if slavery was made illegal. Constantly trying to compromise he finally came to a legislative ban that women over the age of 23 had to be free, and men over the age of 28 had to be freed and were freed when they reached of age and then after 20 years it would be illegal. He was again threatened and lost that battle as well. Soon after though, states began adopting his legislation at state level, but was circumvented when slave holders at the time would sell their slaves near of age out of state. It would take a cultural change where state after state would begin to find slavery as immoral. By the time that finally happened when enough people were on the side to protest and invalidate that law, the civil war broke out.
At the time the US both politically and socially was on a heading for classical liberalism. Individual freedoms at the time were slowly becoming more abundant, just like the founders wanted it to be, it required social change to get there. From the 1860s to the 1880s it all went down hill, the birth of the modern day liberal was born and won the mentality of the people. During the time after the civil war after slavery was banned, the culture and politicians, the movement was working on women rights, increased voting rights, progression of the standard of living. From 1776 to the 1870s, while the rich had gotten richer, the poor had also seen much greater increases in wages and rights, standard of living had slowly increase, economic growth was at a rate that had never been seen even today. When the now known progressive or modern liberal movement won, it polarized the nation, changed the definition of nationalism, created a collectivist mentality. The problem is that it wasn't just this county, but the world. The collective mentality created the tension that would result in WWI and WWII, would create the rise of fascism and communism and erect the nanny state this country as well as the EU would soon adopt.
Yes a true classical liberal world hasn't existed, but every time in history it has, such as Egypt after being liberated from Persian rule until the death of Cleopatra, the Renaissance, US Independence mostly the mid 19th century and the Industrial Revolution, these times in history proved that when societies were moving in that direction that everyone, especially the poor, were better off than before and economic growths were always at all time highs. Today those times look barbaric only because we still have had economic growth, but the economic growth of those days made our world in the 90's to early 2000s look like child's play.
But we have something worse happening. While our standard of living looks much better than that of years past, the movement that caused the wars, caused a slow and eventual crash in the economy has gone rogue, corrupt. No one can deny that especially with all that is in the news, whistle blowers like Manning and Snowden, Assange, the Drone strikes in the Middle East, TSA, NSA, gun regulations, protest/free speech regulations, I can go on and on...we live in a nanny state were almost everything we do in day to day life is deemed illegal or suspicious of terrorist activities, everything we do is wrong and must be taxed for it. It is absolutely ridiculous the power governments have these days when they were deemed by many intellectuals before as nothing more than a guardian of civil liberties and natural law.
