[Prophasi]

The Republicans have given their vision of how we build our future—they've said, 'I got mine, the rest of you are on your own'.

Which is, in turn, a poor job of paraphrasing the actual small-government view, which would be better stated as 'I was on my own, I made it, and you can do the same.'

And not all Republicans/libertarians have made it yet. For them it might be 'I haven't made it yet, but I will -- and so can you.'

Her line implies that the view is an asymmetric "benefits for me, but not for thee" philosophy, which isn't the case. It'd be great if more ideologues had enough confidence in their own views to accurately depict and dispute the opposition's, rather than relying on strawmen.

[joezydeco]

I think the GOP's voting record is enough to show that they can publicly proclaim support for public infrastructure, education, civil rights, and healthcare but then do exactly the opposite when it comes to legislation.

[Prophasi]

Sure. But now you're contrasting the philosophy with what politicians actually do in office. If your argument is that politicians engage in lying and hypocrisy, I don't think you'll find many takers.

But I sincerely hope you'd assert the same (with tweaked parameters) for Democrats.

[joezydeco]

No, I believe I was contrasting the GOP's line

'I was on my own, I made it, and you can do the same.'

With the reality:

'I was on my own, I made it with the assistance of resources that government provides, and you can do the same if we actually wanted to support that mode of government in the future, but we don't.'

[Prophasi]

Fair. What resources did the average Republican take advantage of that s/he now wants to kibosh? Axing roads and bridges is nowhere present in the public discussion.

Of Warren's cited examples, schools are the only plausible answer. To say that school is valuable isn't an insight, and to say that school can only be government-funded and -run is baseless.

An argument can be made that government does it the best, but it's disingenuous to say that because Republicans (along with everyone else, and forcibly) had public schooling, they give up their right to upgrade what they got, for the next generation.

[joezydeco]

I don't think anyone's talking about kiboshing at this point, we're at the earlier stage trying to justify future kiboshing.

Remember that the original discussion here is over whether large government institutions are beneficial to the public or not in the long run.

What tide of public opinion is changing where the editor of the Wall Street Journal feels he needs to write an editorial literally changing the history of the internet to convince people that large institutions were NOT involved in this information age and subsequent economic boom?