As Objectivists, we know our oath means what it says, and further, that it means banning the initiation of physical force against our fellow man. Notice that people do see the truth of that. It is only when individuals or groups are vilified as inferior in some way that a nation seeking to break our rule can muster the mob to attack its target. Is that how it is much more palatble to desperate nations to condone the harassment, violent persecution, and wholesale slaughter of scapegoat groups? What of America? America was the freest nation on earth. Period. And it's sparkle is fading like that of a distant supernova, waning in a global landscape fundamentalism, racism, statism, irrationality. We have heard the scientists tell us that the sun will eventually fade out and that the earth as we know it will cease to exist. But before that happens, we know that it will expand and burn the earth. And America? Did it expand too fast, burning other nations in a horrible explosion of statism under the veil of institutionalizing capitalism across the globe? I don't know the answer, though I fear it is part true. Other reasons? Angered onlookers clamor to blame immigrants, politicians, lawyers, businessmen. Each group has elements within it that illustrate the point that the country is degraded, but what actually caused the rise of statism in a country that was founded on the opposite kind of ideal? Was it the furious expansion into uncharted land that watered the hubris of a nation lusting after natural resources? Was it a racial, ethnic, group-oriented fizzle of a Darwinian manifest destiny? Was it a shadow of the Roman empire releasing it's ferocity against indigenous peoples? Or was it that no one who believed in it remembered how to answer why it is the greatest nation on earth? I fear it is the last. When the sun sets, the moon rises. The cold white light staring down at us might conjure some longing to see the sun rise again. But objectivity is more than a wayside glimmer through the fog. It is a principle, it is a promise, it is a cause - not an effect. If America is to be great again, ever again, it would have to explicitly define its philosophical framework. The sad news is, if America is a stock, people are selling.