There's no such thing as free things, there's just some people paying for other people's things, and surprise surprise some people don't want to use their hard earned money to pay for other people's transport and healthcare.
Ah, the American individualist mindset. It's free, just like schools are free - because we choose to give everyone a basic level of education at no cost, rather than allow people from disadvantaged backgrounds (no parents, mentally or physically ill parents, etc) to grow up illiterate. It works in Europe and most of the developed world. Christ, I am tired of this argument. It's free to the people who use it - I didn't say it had zero cost. Is that easier to understand?
You benefit from this system whether you like it or not - the taxes used to build roads, transport infrastructure, schools and colleges - they benefit YOU, so yes - you can damn well pay back into the system. Feel free to move to Dubai or another low-tax "utopia" of your choice at any point.
And yet too much zero sum thinking leads to a crabs in a bucket mentality were the greedy get less by being greedy instead of having an educated productive society around them.
A large portion (I think it's the majority, but would be happy to be wrong) of our fellow man is a net loss to society, with some smaller percentage being a significant drain.
Giving more and more resources to those people does not make them magically more educated, productive, or congenial.
So it's not a "crabs in a bucket" mentality in that the greedy (which I assume means the wealthy here, as they're the ones funding the public system in the US specifically and the western world for the most part) are trying to keep the lower classes beneath them, it's that they are not interested in wasting their resources to no meaningful end other than increased consumption of low quality or worse goods and services.
> And yet too much zero sum thinking leads to a crabs in a bucket mentality were the greedy get less by being greedy instead of having an educated productive society around them.
These are just your biases. Take Switzerland as an example - it doesn't have any of lefty fetishes OP mentioned ("cheap food, free universal healthcare, free public transport") yet it is highly educated, productive and leaves the door open for people who want to work hard and get ahead to do so.
Heh, we have cities bigger than Switzerland. Trying to use any particular small area without averaging out human behavior is silly because the model will fail.
There's no such thing as free things, there's just some people paying for other people's things, and surprise surprise some people don't want to use their hard earned money to pay for other people's transport and healthcare.