"The idea of collectivism has screwed up every country in which it has been consistently applied, regardless of race, creed, language, resources, culture, and history."

Perfect example. The libertarian paradises you postulate as the obvious alternatives to everything you don't like have never existed in history except in the lurid science fiction of Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein. And yet, you continue to insist that they would evolve naturally if it only weren't for the evil intervention of collectivists. Your collectivists first took power in 1917, and they lasted only 70 years. Don't blame them for the problems of capitalism and its failure to evolve past mercantilism without a little help from socialism first. In fact, the closest we've ever come to these entrepreneurial paradises of yours, the current political/economic organization of the USA and Europe, is what you come to this forum to attack every single day. They are the direct result of the synthesis of socialism and capitalism. The only way we're going to get even semi-free markets in the world is the same way we got them here and in Europe. By using the power of the vote and the strike to force businessmen to give them to us, because the last thing any businessman really wants is a truly free market. They have to be persuaded to accept themselves what they feel is best for us.

Sure, you can always point to some Communist hell-hole as an example of what won't work, but when your critics point to the obvious injustices private enterprise has inflicted on humanity for thousands of years, you always point out "Well, that's different. Those weren't REAL free markets." How convenient. You always seem to set up the rules so you can't lose. That's called framing. No doubt you've heard the term before.

And now, when Communist governments are collapsing all over the place, and being replaced by fascist and very capitalist regimes, you always have that same escape hatch. "That's not REAL free enterprise." So tell me, what is REAL free enterprise? Where and when is it going to arise? How is it going to come about? Where are these libertarian heroes that will supposedly spring forth from the entrepreneurial masses. Well, I'll tell you: there is no libertarian, entrepreneurial paradise, any more than there is a socialist worker's paradise. The best we can hope for is some half-assed combination of the two. It is the only way in history that this problem has ever been solved. And we'll have to watch it like a hawk so some ideologue doesn't take it over and rebuild it in his image. And you know what? Ideologues are just as likely to come from the right as the left. In fact, there ain't much difference between them two, as far as I'm concerned. They both have that same zealous gleam in their eye.

As long as you can blame everything that's wrong with the Universe on "collectivism" you'll continue to find collectivists every place you look. You'll need them to explain away the injustices that don't seem to go away in our increasingly uncollectivized universe. You're lost Tom, but don't reach for your GPS. It has built-in relativistic corrections and quantum-enabled circuitry, it won't work in a Newtonian Universe.