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Is a border wall anti-Objectivist?

Posted by richrobinson 7 years, 2 months ago to The Gulch: General
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The Gulch in Atlas Shrugged was protected by a "virtual wall". Had James Taggert, Orren Boyle and Wesley Mouch found the Gulch they certainly would have been denied entry. Any collectivist would have been denied entry. Why? They hadn't committed a crime. I think this proves that Ayn Rand respected borders and the protection of those borders. Is this a reasonable analogy?


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  • Posted by ewv 7 years, 2 months ago in reply to this comment.
    That disaster will be a lot worse than just paying for illegal immigrants' health care. Republicans are pushing RINOcare -- repeal in name only -- for the same false collectivist premises as the Democrats. The failure they create will lead to the same result as the Democrats intended with Obamacare -- chaos in the medical care and insurance industries leading to a clamor to fix problems caused by government controls with more government controls until they get complete egalitarian nihilistic socialized medicine. RINOcare is already doing that. Without rejecting collectivism they can't do anything else.
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  • Posted by term2 7 years, 2 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I have thought it's better to just repeal Obamacare. "Replacing" with another government run program that pays for the entitlements that now exist isn't going to work either and the blame will fall on the republicans.
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  • Posted by rbroberg 7 years, 2 months ago in reply to this comment.
    This fact does not, of course, incriminate him who does not supply health insurance to illegal immigrants. Rather, it incriminates the men who put into place a system that makes impossible the collection of payments from illegal immigrants for medical services.
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  • Posted by rbroberg 7 years, 2 months ago in reply to this comment.
    That is all fine. However, if the Republicans "repeal and replace" the ACA instead of simply repeal it, then is there some chance that Americans will foot the bill for the undocumented immigrants' medical bills?
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  • Posted by ewv 7 years, 2 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Ayn Rand addressed immigration in answer to a question on limiting it for economic protectionism, discussed on this forum at https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post....

    I don't know of any "Objectivist" scholarly analysis in more detail than her statement on the topic and the elaborations in the references given there (although there have been many rationalizations in her name on behalf of the current standard conflicting views without understanding what she explained and its context).

    There are many options for how a rational immigration policy could be implemented to both legitimately protect the citizens of this country and to accommodate the right of immigration, but none of them could enforce economic protectionism any more than any other government intervention in economic affairs on behalf of pressure groups seeking to use government force for their own perceived economic well being.
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  • Posted by handyman 7 years, 2 months ago in reply to this comment.
    True enough. There is no shortage of interest groups supporting either more immigration (e.g. agriculture) or less (e.g. some unions). Immigration policy is
    part of political philosophy. I don’t know of any scholarly writing on this topic as
    an extension of Objectivism. Does anyone know?

    Objectivism applied to this topic would certainly accommodate some kind of
    “guest worker” program. As with anything else in the political realm, the devils
    will be in the details aided and abetted by all those same interest groups.
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  • Posted by $ Thoritsu 7 years, 2 months ago
    A physical wall is not anti-objectivist, but it is stupid. A virtual wall is far more effective and less expensive. Towers with IR, visual and radar work beautifully. Microwave is an incredible, non-lethal deterrent.
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  • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 7 years, 2 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Regarding King of Kings, we can have that discussion in another area yet again, but aesthetic judgment is not primarily political (or religious). Plot and theme are the primaries. Rand invented plot-theme as their distinct unifying element. You do not need to accept the reality of the Greek pantheon to admire the marbles.
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  • Posted by ewv 7 years, 2 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Protecting the country by defending borders does not mean using borders and walls for economic protectionism.
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  • Posted by ycandrea 7 years, 2 months ago
    The Gulch was private property, not a country or a nation or a gov't.
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  • Posted by Herb7734 7 years, 2 months ago
    Certain neighbors have untrained dogs and they let them roam the neighborhood. Those persons need a fence, and the purpose is to keep things in as well as out which sometimes is lost on anti-wall people. For example, fleeing criminals.
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  • Posted by $ Radio_Randy 7 years, 2 months ago
    I have to take exception to your phrase "they hadn't committed a crime". The things they did to their fellow man may not have been illegal, but they were certainly crimes.

    Also, since Galt's Gulch was private land, borders were absolutely viable in this instance.
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  • Posted by BeenThere 7 years, 2 months ago in reply to this comment.
    She and O'Connor went to Mexico to be married, thus upon returning to the U.S. she entered legally as the spouse of an American citizen. She soon after obtained her legal U.S. citizenship. BT
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  • Posted by mia767ca 7 years, 2 months ago
    ...and a border of "sense of life"....and a border of those who produce and those that are anti-life, reason, and liberty...
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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 7 years, 2 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Specifically, the premise is the presumption of innocence. The presumption of innocence is predicated on the lifetime of experience that the person has built up over his/her lifetime, as well as the ability of a government to verify that innocence.

    The moral justification for restricting immigration from certain countries is the inability for the host country to verify a person's background.

    When someone comes uninvited from another country, it is not unreasonable for the prospective host country to ask the purpose for the potential immigrant's (or visitor's) coming. For a country to elevate a non-citizen's "right to travel freely" above the right of its own citizenry, particularly the right of citizens to be secure in their persons (from the 4th Amendment), is simply irrational and does not deserve further discussion.
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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 7 years, 2 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Dear Killerbee,

    Your link deserves to be a separate post on its own. I compared immigrants to guests earlier today, but terrorists who disguise themselves as refugees deserve to be compared to the barbarians referred to in your link.
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  • Posted by Temlakos 7 years, 2 months ago
    If you mean, is selective admission to a nation-state anti-Objectivist, the answer is no. Nothing in Objectivism declares it moral or rational to invite all comers, nor even to grant automatic citizenship, or even lawful residency, by birth. Emmerich de Vattel did describe that category of lawful residents who were without doubt "naturally born" to their status in one country. But he did not arrive at that description by way of Rand (whom he obviously ante-dated) nor even, as far as I know, by way of Aristotle. (If he derived his definition from Plato's Republic or Laws, that's fine--but Aristotle, and only Aristotle, is the source of "High Objectivism," if you will.)

    For that matter, the Committee of Safety--the Triumvirs--never made or enforced any rule governing the residency of children beyond any "age of decision-making." That's because it never came up. For within twelve years the "code of the looters" collapsed and the Gulch went from hide-away to capital city in a trice. But I have no doubt that every child would have faced a Day of Reckoning, whereon he must take the Oath, or leave, had the collapse taken longer than a generation.
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  • Posted by killerbee 7 years, 2 months ago
    No, it's not anti-Objectivist. In fact just the opposite. The current zero borders (except for Israel) advocacy of ARI, Brook and Binswanger is not consistent with the continuation of the United States as a free country and is not based in fact.

    This is worth reading in its entirety even though it's quite long.

    https://objectivedissent.org/2017/01/...
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  • Posted by term2 7 years, 2 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I think the liberals should think about who they would permit to immigrate onto their property. Its not hard to see that there would definitely be extreme vetting before they would agree to that. Same thing with the country.
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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 7 years, 2 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I knew part of that story, but not the part about "The King of Kings". How ironic that must have been for Ms. Rand.
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