I suppose the author is one of the people that argue that everything should be paid for by a direct transaction. If I walk to the corner store to get a beer, I should pay for the use of the sidewalk because "someone paid to put it there".

There are things that are better for everyone if the cost is borne by everyone. You could argue that because Linux or Emacs are free (as in beer), there's some sort of circumvention of capitalism going on that robs the economy. But how about the fact that thousands of people now can learn how to run a unix system and write program that would otherwise never have paid to do so? I believe there is a net benefit to society there, just like with publicly funded streets and publicly funded research. It induces activity which otherwise would not happen.

Only the most fundamentalist capitalists would argue that common investments are never good, and this strikes me like the same kind of rant. And I'm sorry, but that doesn't convince me one bit.