Except you know... Milton Freidman was the first big supporter of the Negative Income tax.

Negative Income tax being a form of social welfare you don't really need to qualify for except to be poor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

Libertarians still think the government should guarantee the rights of the individual... something that 'no government' cannot accomplish.

Andrew Ryan ruled the pretty Libertarian Rapture. Totally free market, no taxes, no censorship, strong property rights, and, most importantly, a complete lack of ethical considerations. The price to pay? No contact with the surface, as the world governments would surely intervene and destroy the nascent Libertopia.

While the lack of ethics did result in the creation of Plasmids, it also resulted in an unchecked consumption of Adam. Ideally, the population would have kept what was basically their drug use in check, but ideals and actuality oft differ. These "splicers" started rampaging through Rapture to fuel their habits.

However, what really brought down Rapture were the unchecked business practices of Frank Fontaine, who quickly generated wealth based on items gained from the surface, and who then started buying up monopolies of Rapture commodities. As no one had the sheer wealth to start a business to compete with Fontaine (the richest man in Rapture by far), let alone the balls to do so (as people had a tendancy of turning up mysteriously dead when dealing with Fontaine), he soon started raising prices on vital goods and services, resulting in a mostly poverty-stricken Rapture that couldn't afford to defend itself against the Splicers, or Fontaine's rampaging mobs who knew that they were powerful enough, both in economic and Plasmidic terms, to be unstoppable. Andrew Ryan attempted to bring Fontaine under control via hilariously unethical means, but ultimately, the fight between the two ended up killing even more of the citizens of Rapture.

It soon devolved into anarchy because the Libertarian nature of the society allowed a few people to become incredibly powerful simply because of monopolies on limited resources.

And in Mario Brothers, all the toads live happily with no worries even though none of them seem to have jobs.

So clearly a Monarchy ruled by a Princess who can bake is the way to go?

The original Bioshock was a critique of Objectivism, which the head of Irrational found to be nonsense.  Bioshock 2 was a critique of utilitarianism I believe.  I believe Bioshock: Infinite will be taking on nationalism.

It is far more Objectivism than mere Libertarianism in Bioshock.   Libertarianism comes in a number of flavors.  I know I got an education in this when I found that a number of Libertarians think Rand is wrong in some ways.   I know, for example, Rand didn't like Hayek, and Hayek happened to be another individual who some Libertarians look to.  I had one give me a head's up on Hayek.

Not really. Levine chose Objectivism because he created the idea of Rapture first and then had to think of a reason that a bunch of people would decide to live underwater. The whole "going Galt" thing seemed to fit perfectly. The only real criticism he seemed to have of Ayn Rand wasn't about her ideas so much as her personal intensity and seemingly complete and utter lack of self doubt, which is how Andrew Ryan came about. But he has said that he's sympathetic to her philosophy.

Levine said he actually wrote the story of BioShock as a fan of Ayn Rand's precepts.

"I'm probably way more similar to her in my terms of how I think about religion and politics than any other philosophers," he said.

Bioshock 2 wasn't really a critique of anything, so far as I could tell. It was just a(n incredibly fun and well made) cash-in that Levine had nothing to do with. Infinite seems to be more politically complicated on its face, with a sort of Tea Party-esque traditionalist faction and a populist Occupy Wall Street type faction, but it still seems to be less about particular ideologies and more about what happens when people become political fanatics.

Doesn't really matter, I'd use that example for pretty much any critique of any form of government, right down to facism.

As i've mentioned before, one thing I very much dislike is people who base their opinions on socity based primarily on works of fiction.

In their present form, videogames can't replace literary discussions of political ideology. The players usually have the freedom to determine at what pace and in what order events will unfold. They typically cannot be fast-forwarded or rewound, can't always be walked away from at any point, and can't be flipped through or searched for useful quotes. More importantly, they are not pure exposition. The challenges of gameplay-fights, tests of reflexes and agility, puzzles, and navigation-act as roadblocks in the way of a smooth path from start to finish. Could The Constitution of Liberty have made such an impression on Margaret Thatcher if she had to win a virtual fight with an undersea mutant every time she wanted to turn the page? Books, we may hope, will never die.

But by tackling the issues involved in applying political ideology to a ‘realworld' society, Bioshock demonstrates videogames' ever-growing seriousness and maturity. The game had sold over a million copies by mid-2008, and is one of the most highly rated titles on the current generation of videogame systems. Its critical and commercial success indicates that the mainstream is ready to embrace games of its kind, even if they usually have to be lured with action and pyrotechnics.

Is Bioshock's popularity good for libertarianism? It is, after all, a critique of one very influential strand of individualist thinking. In an article for the gaming blog Kotaku, Levine admits that despite Bioshock's uncomplimentary depiction of Objectivism's consequences when applied, he's sympathetic to it as a philosophy. ‘I find a lot of positive in it,' he says. ‘I find [Rand's] notion of selfishness is very interesting, not living for ... others, believing in the individual man as the central powerful force in the world rather than a government or a supreme being.' The same article quotes Yaron Brook, President of the Ayn Rand Institute, saying, ‘Ultimately it doesn't portray objectivism well, but the mainstreaming of objectivism is important too. And it's important to see the willingness to debate those ideas even in a video game.'

http://ipa.org.au/publications/1742/a-slave-obeys-a-player-chooses

Bioshock seems to be going through different ideological systems, and then takes them to an extreme and throws them into a dystopia.  The build the world on this ideological belief or that one, which is more of what I was trying to say.  I believe the doing this leads to the game serving as a critique of that ideology.

Anyhow, where I got what I said was from another interview, with very likely someone else who got involved with the game.  Anyhow, maybe "commentary on" would be a better way of saying it than "critique".

Sort of, yeah. But the particular ideologies really just give the games their flavor. Some work better than others depending on the setting, and you'd be hard pressed to find a better ideology to justify the existence of a Rapture or a Columbia than Objectivism and nationalism respectively, but you could still plug in any old political belief and it would be serviceable. The common thread of the series seems to be a rumination on utopianism and the psychology of the True Believer, as per Eric Hoffer.