Ayn Rand on Immigration

[Mark]

New on ARI Watch:
Ayn Rand on Immigration

This is part 1. There will a part 2 called something like “What is a Nation” that will be more deductive than journalistic.

[Brant Gaede]

I remember Ayn Rand making those remarks about Russia (the USSR) and even Judge Lurie getting that one question ass backwards when he repeated it. I don't remember much if anything about immigration, but it sounds right.

My impression from being exposed to her for over 50 years is that considering today's context she'd endorse immigration restriction as a matter of national defense. It wouldn't be hard since she was so pro-Israel and so anti-Arab and so pro-America. ARI and Bingswanger aren't making any sense, certainly not about Rand if she were here today. And if you take her at her word she'd consider any institute with her name on it to be an abomination for that reason alone. Did Peikoff ever try to justify it qua her?

--Brant

I bet LP has been continually low-grade simmering pissed off at Rand for decades considering his behavior if it's vengeful instead of ignorant stupid--not that stupid is a generalization on his intelligence, only this thing

[Selene]

Just for the record, Ayn would have known about Eisenhower's removal of up to 1.3 million illegal immigrants in 1954 as part of Operation Wetback.

Lasting almost a year, the INS claimed 1.3 million because they included their estimates of folks that self deported rather than be snared in the net.

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/pqo01

It is a good thing that this is not an issue now...oops

It is difficult to estimate the number of people forced to leave by the operation. The INS claimed as many as 1,300,000, though the number officially apprehended did not come anywhere near this total. The INS estimate rested on the claim that most undocumented immigrants, fearing apprehension by the government, had voluntarily repatriated themselves before and during the operation. The San Antonio district, which included all of Texas outside of El Paso and the Trans-Pecos, had officially apprehended slightly more than 80,000, and local INS officials claimed that an additional 500,000 to 700,000 had fled to Mexico before the campaign began. Many commentators have considered these figures to be exaggerated. Various groups opposed any form of temporary labor in the United States. The American G.I. Forum, for instance, by and large had little or no sympathy for the man who crossed the border illegally. Apparently the Texas State Federation of Labor supported the G.I. Forum's position. Eventually the two organizations coproduced a study entitled What Price Wetbacks?, which concluded that illegal immigration in United States agriculture damaged the health of the American people, that undocumented migrant workers displaced American workers, that they harmed the retailers of McAllen, and that the open-border policy of the American government posed a threat to the security of the United States. Critics of Operation Wetback considered it xenophobic and heartless.

The Atlantic, noted in a 2006 article that quotes Immigration agents that tie business and corruption together in a nice bow, explaining that:

Profits from illegal labor led to the kind of corruption that apparently worried Eisenhower. Joseph White, a retired 21-year veteran of the Border Patrol, says that in the early 1950s, some senior US officials overseeing immigration enforcement "had friends among the ranchers," and agents "did not dare" arrest their illegal workers.

Continuing they cite:

Walt Edwards, who joined the Border Patrol in 1951, tells a similar story. He says: "When we caught illegal aliens on farms and ranches, the farmer or rancher would often call and complain [to officials in El Paso]. And depending on how politically connected they were, there would be political intervention. That is how we got into this mess we are in now."

Bill Chambers, who worked for a combined 33 years for the Border Patrol and the then-called US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), says politically powerful people are still fueling the flow of illegals.

During the 1950s, however, this "Good Old Boy" system changed under Eisenhower – if only for about 10 years.

Now here is the difference between a President who knows how to execute his Constitutional functions with intelligent action carried out by serious men and the man child in the White House.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0706/p09s01-coop.html

A....

[william.scherk]

I've read Mark's remarkable article. He repeats the trope "mass Third World immigration" -- as he has repeated the phrase in earlier comments at OL -- without defining it. Is the trope meaningful? I don't know until he lays out what he means. I don't know if he sticks by the Cold-War meaning, or if he sticks by a looser definition that includes 'developing nations.' I surmise that he would include newly industrialized nations (since WWII) such as Brazil, India, South Africa, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and so on.

I am also puzzled a bit over the issue of Rand's immigration. Mark writes:

Ayn Rand came to the U.S. legally in 1926, two years after passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 – and in those days immigration law was enforced. Her premise, that immigration was not restricted in 1926, is untrue.

-- and --

Ayn Rand had the benefit of the Immigration Act of 1924 all her life here, from her arrival in 1926, to 1968 when it was rescinded, to a dozen or so years beyond that before the consequence of its end became evident. When, four decades ago, Ayn Rand answered that question about immigration, her experience was with European immigration, which then meant white immigration – and at a slow and measured rate.

It's my understanding, from reading Barbara Branden's biography, that Rand entered American not under the quota system refined in the 1924 act, but on a visitor visa. After several extensions, she was due to return to Russia (which quota was barely above 2000 per annum). Instead of vacating the country upon the end of her extension, she married Frank O'Connor in 1929. The marriage allowed her to move from 'visitor' to permanent resident, and then to become a naturalized citizen in 1930. As a woman married to a US citizen, she escaped the quotas.

One of the intents of the 1924 act was to restrict Jews -- which immigrants at that point in time were overwhelmingly from Russia. It is doubtful to me that she would have been able, as a single woman, to enter the US under the quotas.

One interesting oddity of the restrictive act of 1924 was that there were no quotas at all for peoples of the Americas.

Immigration from North and South America was not restricted -- there were no barriers to emigrants from Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America (unless they were black), nor were their restrictions on emigrants from Canada (unless they were black). It wasn't until passage of the reform acts in 1965 that restrictions were made on Mexican immigrants, for example.

I think it is fair to say that Mark prefers a white America and that he does not wish to share a neighbourhood with non-whites. That is his right of preference. I find that unfortunate. He has told us that he thinks nations should be defined by culture or ethnicity, if not race. This indeed was the effect of the population displacements and transfers following two world wars, which broke up multi-ethnic states and empires.

As for the possibility that America will revert to a racialist policy in immigration, I think it is effectively zero. It just ain't gonna happen, in my opinion. That may be maddening and frustrating and counter to deeply-felt opinions, but there you go.

Once Mark wrote here: "Do you want to be surrounded by Vietnamese every time you leave your house, no matter how filtered they are for intelligence, freedom from disease, etc.?" He also wrote, "Wanting -- and working to return to -- a predominantly white USA is the selfish thing to do."

Those are perfectly frank opinions, and although unappealing to me, may very well underlay other folks' revulsion for immigration. Certainly the folks at the "Immigration Patriots" site Vdare make their revulsion for non-white people clear. If, as Mark asserts, "Third World immigration has brought ruin to our country, permanently," well, such fatalism is what it is.

The only really disturbing thing Mark has written on OL concerns his agnostic attitude to the Holocaust. He is no expert, he says. "I haven’t studied the gassing question much but those who argue against it seem more reasonable than their opposition. The gassings may well go the way of the soap atrocity story."

-- does this mean that Mark would support a David Irving-style 'revision' of extermination camps history? I don't know. I doubt it.

You might hate urban Canada, Mark, I think. Of all the Western immigrant-nations, Canada has the highest rate of inter-racial couplings/marriages -- the rates increase with each census. The boundaries of ethnicity and skin colour and culture are breached, for better or worse, and among the young, raised in a multicultural reality, there is something shameful about buried racial prejudice. We like to argue hard about such things -- even in Quebec, which has perhaps the deepest fears of cultural 'swamping' and the disappearance of the French Fact.

I think OL would benefit from a full, frank, honest and principled debate about White America and its doom. I don't wish Mark to moderate or self-censor.

Here's a fun video from a Vancouver lady of Asian extraction, actor-director Leenda Dong, part of her massively popular online series. This one is If Your Period Was A Person. Vancouver Asian comedy at its finest. You would never know she was, er, Vietnamese.

See also her What Kind of Sexy Half Asian are you? -- and the absolutely hilarious guest spot on the Fong Bros channel, Asian Canadians Vs Asians Americans

[Wolf DeVoon]

I didn't have the patience to read the whole article, but one line jumped out at me, when he interpreted Rand to have said or meant "Patriotism is out the window" -- which is fine by me and makes a lot of sense when you think about it.

[Selene]

Found this:

Rand’s own views

Below is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of Ayn Rand Answers, an interview of Rand by two students. You can read the entire chapter here. The interview has been cited here and here.

ARI: Can you give a specific example of when she responded angrily to a question?

MARY ANN: Someone asked her for her views on immigration, if she thought it was a good thing. And she got indignant immediately at the very idea that anyone might be opposed to immigration, that a country might not let immigrants in. One of the things she said in her answer was, “Where would I be today if America closed its doors to immigrants?” That really hit home; I’m sure everyone there realized that she would not have survived in Soviet Russia, that a person with her ideas would have died in prison, somewhere in Siberia. In her answer, she was defending people who were seeking freedom and a better life. And I think she was assuming that immigrants would be like she was—ready and able to make their own way, accepting help if voluntarily given by individuals but not expecting government handouts. But it was clear that she was angry at the idea, not at the person asking the question.

I heard people saying things like “I had no idea what I was really advocating.” Ayn was teaching the students the importance of analyzing their ideas, of understanding what was implicit in what they had been taught to believe and why it was wrong and often evil.

http://openborders.info/ayn-rand-immigration-obvious/

[Mark]

Wolf, I understand what you mean about patience. The article is “for the record” – it had to be written if I want to talk about immigration on a website devoted to the Ayn Rand Institute.

I'd hoped people would get the meaning of that word patriotism, as you did. [ADDED: See however Wolf's post below.]

[Mark]

And now for WSS:

“... there were no barriers to emigrants from Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America (unless they were black) ...”

Nope.

In my article I simplified the history a bit in the interest of brevity. Before the Act of 1924 there was the Act of 1921, which mandated very limited immigration per quotas based on the census of 1910. But people wanted to roll back the clock even further. The Act of 1924 mandated immigration per the census of 1890. The Act of 1929 made it the census of 1920. In all these Acts, Latin America was excluded from the quotas.

Things began to unravel during and after World War II. The Bracero program in 1942 brought in Mexican contract labor, probably anticipating a loss of men sent off to war. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (which I mention in one of the footnotes) was repealed in 1943 – yet another unfortunate consequence of the U.S. entering the war. The Displaced Persons Act of 1948 brought in half a million war refugees, mostly from Europe. The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 ended most of the remaining racial restrictions. Still, the overall rate was kept low. Then came the infamous Act of 1965 (effective 1968), as described in the article.

“The only really disturbing thing Mark has written on OL concerns his agnostic attitude to the Holocaust.”

This thread is about “Ayn Rand on Immigration.” The above is worse than going off on a tangent, it’s more like a secant or a perpendicular. However ...

I didn’t say I was agnostic about the Nazis killing a lot of Jews. It’s the “six million in gas chambers” that’s questionable – both the number and the method, not that the method matters a heck of a lot to the victims.

David Irving, whom the placidly venomous William Scott Scherk mentions, now claims to have a paper trail of Nazi documents showing that they killed from 1.5 to 2 million Jews by machine guns, into open pits where they were buried in mass graves. He claims there were no systematic gas chambers, and that the 6 million figure is an exaggeration. He also claims that the machine gun mass murder was not ordered by Hitler, that Himmler kept Hitler in the dark about it. (About the last I’d say: it’s interesting but keep in mind even if true it doesn’t excuse Hitler from setting up the conditions for the mass murder. Irving doesn’t say it does, but some people might use it that way.)

As I said, I don’t know enough to evaluate this. Historical research and discussion has been made politically incorrect in the U.S. and England, and criminalized in Europe.

Personally I am annoyed at having been fed those stupid soap & lampshade atrocity stories when I was a kid. Even mainstream historians don’t believe that baloney anymore. I think Irving is a highly intelligent man who has been mistreated by intellectuals and the law.

Certain Jewish groups literally worship their holocaust, it is sacred to them, they sacralize history so that it is no longer a real event open to research and investigation. To question it is blasphemy. Most people here probably know about Irving being jailed in Austria for the crime of “holocaust denial.” That’s what I find really disturbing. (Comment from ARI: Nada.) The sentence was three years, in a very small cell, of which he served one year and one month.

I don’t have any more to say about it. If WSS wants to talk about it further he should start another thread.

[william.scherk]

And now for WSS: [...]

“The only really disturbing thing Mark has written on OL concerns his agnostic attitude to the Holocaust.”

This thread is about “Ayn Rand on Immigration.” The above is worse than going off on a tangent, it’s more like a secant or a perpendicular.

Take it up with the boss. Thread drift or tangent-taking is not a punishable offense, as far as I know.

However ...

I didn’t say I was agnostic about the Nazis killing a lot of Jews.

Sure enough. I claimed you have an agnostic attitude to the Holocaust. It is a claim borne out by your plain words below ...

As I said, I don’t know enough to evaluate this.

There you go. Agnostic. QED. As I noted above, your plain words were "I haven’t studied the gassing question much but those who argue against it seem more reasonable than their opposition."

That says a lot, at least to me. Mileage may vary for other readers.

Most people here probably know about Irving being jailed in Austria for the crime of “holocaust denial.”

David Irving is a Holocaust denier, plain and simple. He was stupid enough to travel to Austria knowing he was barred from its territory (as he was at certain times barred from entering Canada, Germany and Italy). He was an 'illegal entrant' to a sovereign state. Don't states have the right to bar entry and maintain their borders, Mark? Hmmmm?

In any case, Irving pleaded guilty to the charge of "trivialising, grossly playing down and denying the Holocaust." He actually told the Austrian court that he had changed his mind, testifying that "I've changed my views. I spoke then about Auschwitz and gas chambers based on my knowledge at the time, but by 1991 when I came across the Eichmann papers, I wasn't saying that any more and I wouldn't say that now. The Nazis did murder millions of Jews. ..I made a mistake by saying there were no gas chambers, I am absolutely without doubt that the Holocaust took place."

Two days later, he regressed to the mean in a jailhouse interview, stating that Jews "bear blame for what happened." Jews held far too much power, see, and their 'control' of the US meant there would be another Holocaust "in 20 to 30 years".

Once he was expelled from Austria at the end of his sentence, he doubled down. Once back in Britain, he said there was "no need any longer to show remorse."

Wonderfully, the woman who prevailed against Irving in his failed libel suit** against her, Deborah Lipstadt, was fully against the Austrian charges and his jailing. "I am uncomfortable with imprisoning people for speech. Let him go and let him fade from everyone's radar screens," she said.

It was interesting to learn, via the Nizkor Project, of the odious company kept by Irving: it reminded me of the first time I heard of him, when he was a witness for the defense in the trial of Ernst Zundel, Canada's demented hatemonger. I quote from Lipstadt's book:

At the second trial Christie and Faurisson were joined by David Irving, who flew to Toronto in January 1988 to assist in the preparation of Zundel's second defense and to testify on his behalf. Scholars have described Irving as a "Hitler partisan wearing blinkers" and have accused him of distorting evidence and manipulating documents to serve his own purposes. He is best known for his thesis that Hitler did not know about the Final Solution, an idea that scholars have dismissed. The prominent British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper depicted Irving as a man who "seizes on a small and dubious part particle of 'evidence'" using it to dismiss far-more substantial evidence that may not support his thesis. His work has been described as "closer to theology or mythology than to history," and he has been accused of skewing documents and misrepresenting data in order to reach historically untenable conclusions, particularly those that exonerate Hitler. An ardent admirer of the Nazi leader, Irving placed a self-portrait of Hitler over his desk, described his visit to Hitler's mountaintop retreat as a spiritual experience, and declared that Hitler repeatedly reached out to help the Jews. In 1981 Irving, a self-described "moderate fascist", established his own right-wing political party, founded on his belief that he was meant to be a future leader of Britain. He is an ultra-nationalist who believes that Britain has been on a steady path of decline accelerated by its decision to launch a war against Nazi Germany. He has advocated that Rudolf Hess should have received the Nobel Prize for his efforts to try to stop war between Britain and Germany. On some level Irving seems to conceive himself as carrying on Hitler's legacy.

[...] Prior to participating in Zundel's trial, Irving had appeared at IHR conferences [...] but he had never denied the annihilation of the Jews. That changed in 1988 as a result of the events in Toronto.

I don’t have any more to say about it. If WSS wants to talk about it further he should start another thread.

Yeah. Sorry to spoil your party. You don't control discussion. Your agnostic attitude towards the Holocaust sheds light on your certainties, your gnosis, your conclusions that immigration has destroyed America the White. If you don't like being challenged, don't post. Simple.

As for your characterization: "placidly venomous William Scott Scherk," I like it! Especially considering your own poisonous nonsense.

_____________________

** from the judgment:

The judge summarised his findings as follows:

“Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.. therefore the defence of justification succeeds... It follows that there must be judgment for the Defendants."

Edited October 10, 2015 by william.scherk

[Mark]

Nothing a person says from a jailhouse, in a country with little respect for free speech, can be taken at face value. You say what will help get you out. We all know the story of Galileo.

As was doubtless clear to everyone but WSS, that little viper, I’m sure the Nazis killed many Jews. How and how many is another question. From random reading, not just Irving, I think the six million claim is much exaggerated. But why worry whether it was 1.5 million or 6? Jews worry because to them the history is religious dogma rather than facts. It’s got to be 6 and nothing less will do. (Oddly enough they never seem to claim more. A bull’s eye the first time.)

[anthony]

Why worry? 1.5 mill, or 6 mill? What's in a number, anyway?

The reductionism(/enhancement) of historical fact will ensure that in 20 or so more years of Internet-perusing, further Irving-types will have 'established' that the number was merely 150 thou -- and so on, until one day all that will be remembered is that the Nazis were nasty to Jews. (And with justification, never forget).

Right, so Irving and others would have us insanely accepting that many or most of a surviving wife, a son, a sister, an uncle, cousin, nephew (etc.) completely fabricated the life, name and disappearance of their (fictitious) husband, mother, brother (etc.) in what must have been the greatest conspiracy of all. Then, Jews are notorious for their conspiracies - QED.

Irving doesn't interest or bother me - those not-decreasing numbers who would tend to prefer his version, over and above the millions of accounts on record, official and personal - do. Why should they so badly 'want' it to be so?

[william.scherk]

WSS, that little viper

What? I thought I was "placidly venomous." You know, like a cane toad.

Anyhow, I think I have got your number, from the JOOOOS thread in the Garbage Pile. If I think you spout bigoted claptrap, I will say so, as I did in the JOOOOOS thread in the Garbage Pile.

A quote to give proportion, This is you, Mark, from the JOOOOS thread in the Garbage Pile:

Speaking of eugenics, especially the Nazi version, and Third World immigration, I’d like to paraphrase (not an exact quote, but close) something originally by Peter Brimelow, about the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, officially the Hart-Cellar bill, the culmination of a 40 year effort by B’nai B’rith and other Jewish organizations:

There is a sense in which current immigration policy is Adolf Hitler’s posthumous revenge on America. The U.S. political elite emerged from the war passionately concerned to cleanse itself from all taints of racism and xenophobia. Eventually it enacted the epochal Immigration Reform Act of 1965. This triggered a mass immigration so huge and so different from anything that had gone before as to transform—and ultimately to destroy—the one unquestioned victor of World War II.

[Wolf DeVoon]

I'd hoped people would get the meaning of that word patriotism, as you did.

I hope you realize I'm foursquare against patriotism (Das Vaterland, Mother Russia, the Holy Land, etc).

There seems to be a lot of trivia I know nothing about, so I read the Wikipedia article on David Irving. Strikes me as something like a self-taught Mexican neurosurgeon. Does good work once in a while, but I wouldn't want him to operate on my daughter. Same thing is true of myself, by the way. A few interesting ideas about the law, but you'd be better off with Gerry Spence as a defense attorney.

[Mark]

I took patriotism to mean the general affection a person might feel for the area in which he lives. Admittedly it’s hard to define, but anyway the main point is that patriotism is distinct from love of the government of one’s country. Rand said, in the Q&A, that if you stay and fight a dictatorship – which I take to be a patriotic act – then you support that dictatorship. Which isn’t too consistent of Rand.

[Mark]

Addressing WSS’s post ...

The West’s passivity in the face of conquest by immigration – such is Hitler revenge.

That is Peter Brimelow’s perceptive observation. People became afraid to mention race when race is relevant.

Getting details of history correct, such as how many men the Nazis executed (or worked to death, in both cases many Gentiles too though they don’t seem to matter as much) is what historians do. For some of them research is for getting the facts straight.

You anti-anti-semites contort your own faces when you write “JOOOOS.”

Me, I’m an anti-semite, as I’ve said before – see the above, see ARI Watch. Abe Foxman loves me. Make that Jonathan Greenblatt, special assistant to Barack Obama.

[Wolf DeVoon]

I took patriotism to mean the general affection a person might feel for the area in which he lives. Admittedly it’s hard to define, but anyway the main point is that patriotism is distinct from love of the government of one’s country. Rand said, in the Q&A, that if you stay and fight a dictatorhip – which I take to be a patriotic act – then you support that dictatorship. Which isn’t too consistent of Rand.

Love of area? Because you were born there? Easily one of the stupidest things I ever heard. If you stay and fight, you lose. The government wins. If you escape, they lose (minus one victim plus future children and grandchildren).

The meaning of liberty is to do what's best for yourself, not what's best for the neighbors.

[anthony]

Though they reach different conclusions, between ARI Watch and ARI - not much distinction on immigration. They both drop context, ARI in its rationalist idealism and ARI Watch in its reactionary skepticism. The context IS (for now) the opening of the borders in a cynical maneouvre by a wannabe Welfarist and egalitarian Government, to the type of immigrants who will be more attracted by welfare statism in a rich country, less by the American ideal. With an eventual pushback against welfarism, immigration will return to its prior, moral context.

[Mark]

Wolf,

Back in 1920 in Russia, for example, leaving Russia to the Soviets and trying to make a life somewhere else was the best option for some Russians. It was for Ayn Rand.

But can you envision having to make a last stand somewhere?

[Wolf DeVoon]

a last stand

Like the Alamo, I suppose. Everybody dead.

[Brant Gaede]

I took patriotism to mean the general affection a person might feel for the area in which he lives. Admittedly it’s hard to define, but anyway the main point is that patriotism is distinct from love of the government of one’s country. Rand said, in the Q&A, that if you stay and fight a dictatorship – which I take to be a patriotic act – then you support that dictatorship. Which isn’t too consistent of Rand.

That's so wrong you should not write another word on patriotism. This like describing a cake as the flour that went into it. Period.

--Brant

[Brant Gaede]

a last stand

Like the Alamo, I suppose. Everybody dead.

Uh, Wolf, would you take this mesage to Sam Houston?

--William Travis

[Mark]

Wolf,

Are you saying patriotism is love of your government, which might be your rulers? What do you call Snowden, a traitor, a patriot, or what?

[Brant Gaede]

I'm just saying you don't know it from either your life or introspection. You never saw or ate the cake. Why that is is a great question. Most young men head right down to the recruiting station in time of supposed national peril or need of them fully supported and propelled, even, by the hoime front. Patriotism, though, is not nationalism. Nationalism is patriotism on steroids bordering on a political movement. The US hasn't seen that since right before Pearl Harbor. You could be something of a nationalist. If so you wouldn't be conversant with patriotism which is much more complicated, nuanced and jejune comparatively.

--Brant

[Brant Gaede]

I took patriotism to mean the general affection a person might feel for the area in which he lives. Admittedly it’s hard to define, but anyway the main point is that patriotism is distinct from love of the government of one’s country. Rand said, in the Q&A, that if you stay and fight a dictatorhip – which I take to be a patriotic act – then you support that dictatorship. Which isn’t too consistent of Rand.

Love of area? Because you were born there? Easily one of the stupidest things I ever heard. If you stay and fight, you lose. The government wins. If you escape, they lose (minus one victim plus future children and grandchildren).

The meaning of liberty is to do what's best for yourself, not what's best for the neighbors.

This seems basically libertarian and also Randian selfish. I don't think it addresses common psychology which may partially explain both the attraction, somewhat, of Rand to libertarians and why the political philosophy has gone nowhere. There's a small body of people who seem to be built differently than most folk, likely for genetic reasons, who are mostly inclined to an intellectual life and their brians both unbalance them and make them more than a little purblind to people in the mass. At least Rand was centered on ethics and human action sans government for her good guys. The libertarian primary focus on politics leaves someone like you busting his brain on a constitutional construct that might work if the world was filled with Aspie libertarians and/or Wolf clones. That's not likely true for I think there would be as many constitutions as there were people of your orientation, but there's only one "Freeman's Constitution" (and it's in COGIGG) I know of. If there were a hundred there could be constant feedback between the authors and competition. Have there been any substantial improvements by you since your book on your proposed structure(s)?

--Brant

[Mark]

I'm just saying ... nuanced and jejune comparatively.

What a hash of words. What reply is possible to “nuanced and jejune”?

Brant knows nothing about my personal situation.

I think the young men who enlisted after the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941 were fools, that is, were fooled by a corrupt FDR administration.