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Originally Posted by freeweed
Not by itself, no. But the attitudes that lead to it are. Fear, desire to be isolated from society, segregation based on class lines... those are what people have a problem with. No one gives a shit if someone is a kook who wants to live like a hermit. Hell, I live in the suburbs precisely because I can't handle the noise and hassles involved with shared wall accommodations. What people have an issue with is the end result of the attitudes of people who want to take their wealth and wall off the rest of the world as a result.
Atlas Shrugged isn't exactly a study in being nice to each other. And it's essentially the logical endgame of what gated communities stand for.
The entire issue is born out of ideology. No one (here anyway) is arguing that these things should be illegal. We find the reasoning behind them abhorrent, is all.
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Again, this is a pretty extreme picture you are trying to paint of the psyche of a person who buys a property in a gated community. You sound like you want to be judge, jury, and executioner to convict people for a thought crime based on reasons you invent for the motivations of why people buy the things they buy.
The problem is the same exact logic works for nearly any thing. The logical conclusion of purchasing almost any luxury item could be "the person wants to segregate themselves along class lines to be isolated from society" - from simple things like buying a car (they want to segregate themselves from public transportation and wall off the rest of the world!) to even taking a damned vacation (want to segregate themselves from the working class, the logical conclusion of which is World War Z!). Do people who buy leather shoes want to signal to the rest of society that they are not a member of the "commoners" and so leather shoes should be considered abhorrent?
Do some people buy cars and take vacations and buy shoes and think that way? Of course, but really it's not anyone's place to judge the motivations or even potential thoughts of other people. At the end of the day, these are luxury items, and people are choosing to spend their money on something that they enjoy, for whatever reason and the reason itself is for no one to judge.
You can ascribe any kind of abhorrent and nefarious twist to the behaviour of other people for virtually anything they do, the end result of which is you are simply convicting people for thought crimes you suspect them of thinking.
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Then we probably agree more than anything. I don't think the government owns your estate lock, stock and barrel - but I think handing down tremendous wealth to the next generation benefits absolutely no one (and has all sorts of deleterious effects on society, like a desire to live in a gated community and not with the commoners).
We probably disagree a lot more on things like multi-tier healthcare, where I suspect you'd have the same opinion as with gated communities - that it doesn't hurt anyone else if a rich person uses their wealth to obtain better healthcare. Which when it's one guy is absolutely correct.
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Health care is just a complicated subject. It might surprise you but in ideal terms we probably have a similar outlook for health care, practically speaking is another matter and in the real world of compromises and complexity, a multi tier system could have it's place.