[dualvariable]

> There's a whole ball of wax here that boils down to whether a society would rather be individualistic or collectivist.

Yeah, but the US seems to me to be one of the worst places for individual responsibility. Everyone expects their environment to be perfect safe, and they can behave with a large degree of personal negligence, and if anything goes wrong they want to sue anyone they can think of. And then corporations take defensive actions against that, and you wind up with "do not take Flumitrol if you are allergic to Flumitrol" kinds of warnings everywhere. It is "individualistic" in the most narrowly narcissistic sense, which I don't think is what the founders envisioned either.

[dv_dt]

The way I see it is that enabling individualism, perhaps through strongly collective rules is very different than individualistically segmenting all sorts of experiences and protections. The latter of which, as you have noted, may not result in individualism on any sort of practical level - especially if it just lets large corporations mow down all sorts of people segmented to an individual level of power.