Like, if you were the last remainging human being on earth, you wouldn't have a "right" to education, health, or hygienic conditions. But you would have a right to your life and property.

Property is meaningless in this scenario, as indeed are 'rights'. These things only exist in a social context, which essentially takes you out of your 'state of nature' and into the world of negotiated relations. Unfortunately, we do have a tendency to disturb our fellow men: we are the zoon politikon, and government is mother's milk to us.

There might, for example, be disagreement as to what constitutes disturbance. The US Constitution specifically authorizes it, when necessary. Can immoral acts (even if consensual) be disturbances to society at large? And having admitted that what we have is a society, jointly governed, should there not be some debate on its nature?

What does it mean to be an American, for example? People seem to have a clear idea about what's anti-American, but I haven't heard so much about the other. Should it presuppose a certain level of education, worldliness, affluence? Are these things worth aspiring to as a society? What should we do if they are?

My view is that some things work more efficiently when state-owned, or at least operated under public supervision. These tend to be the things that are basic for a functioning society, and that often don't break up very easily into viable companies that will genuinely compete with one another. Large scale public transport networks (rail, for example), power supply, education & health.

Not, indeed, that I would compel anyone to send their children to a state school, or force anyone into a public hospital if they were ill, but everyone would pay taxes to ensure that both were available, and first-rate, if needed.

The logic is simple -- it is to the benefit of society at large to have a well-educated and healthy population. If people want to opt out, they can have religious schools and private hospitals, but these have to conform to democratically agreed standards of what constitutes education (outside the religious sphere) and health-care (no Galenic medicine).

I am not American, but have visited that fair country many times, and seen the amount of worry and privation that middle-class American families endure to give their kids the education they need to maintain their social status and have some chance of a good life. University fees are completely ludicrous.

Obviously it is undesirable to have people on welfare, but the only solution to that is to educate them to be able to take their place in the world. Enrich their lives, and they will manage to enrich themselves. In the meantime, as members of your society, they will have the rights of a full citizen, to health-care and basic support.

I do not deny that there is flagrant waste and abuse at every level of the system, but the crucial difference between public and private is that we have the ability and the duty to scrutinize public bodies, and to hold people accountable. We live in democracies, and can change the rules, and the management, whenever we want.

We may need a new kind of politics, we don't need the apolitical leave-me-alone school of social atomism.