Matt Bruening, in a recent blog post, hits the nail on the head when he discusses "The amusing case of Tech Libertarians" but I think the basic premise found in this passage can easily be extrapolated to the rest of society as well:

In some ways, the tech libertarian thing suffers from the exact same problem all myopic egotism suffers from: an inadequate appreciation for the giants we all stand on and how insignificant our personal contribution is relative to them. A 22-year-old techie that comes on to the scene today is standing on the tip of thousands of years of accumulated math knowledge, materials sciences, electricity breakthroughs, chip manufacturing breakthroughs, hardware innovations like integrated circuits, an entire library of software to both learn from and use, and of course hundreds of thousands of dollars of educational investments they had nothing to do with. Yet, the little bit they mix on top of all of that is enough to convince some they are truly Great Men of the John Galt variety.