DavidOdden

There are plenty of rooms and whole office towers going half-filled, so a shortage of rooms is not an issue. What matters is having a just basis for laws. The basic failing of the US Constitution (not that I think they could have forseen the problem, or that the authors all would have wanted to forsee it) is that it is non-hierarchical, and does not have a clear and enforceable central purpose. A system of objective laws would contain essential statements such as what the purpose of government is -- and all laws must be judged according to how they satisfy that purpose. All laws must be explicitly justified by reference to that purpose. And I would go so far as say that principles of legal interpretation and procedure must be part of the Constitution itself (and of course must themselveves be justified). Examples are the two witness rule, the rule of lenity, and the last antecedent rule: I don't necessarily agree with the latter, but it's just an example]. In fact, Supreme Court justices, who know a hell of a lot about law, can't get it together on some of these rules, so it's really insane to ask a juror to understand and apply these principles. You might think "Well, this would all go away if only we didn't have bad laws like those outlawing prostitution", but the problem of objective interpretation is at the heart of contract disputes, where these basic principles are still relevant. Having a snorting, dismissing attitude and saying that there's always room for reinterpretation basically says "Problems of jurisprudence are trivial and will be swept away after the revolution". Okay, let me repeat. They say "Activities which do not affect anyone but the actor have been criminalized by government on the basis of encoding a particular morality into law". I assume they they mean things like prostitution, drinking, smoking, drugs, porn, and reading Kant. I agree that the government should not make it a crime to drink, hire a whore, smoke tobacco or weed, or even read Kant. But the reason is not that "these acts do not affect anyone else". It is important to not base your decisions about rights on a broken foundation, and this is a broken foundation. Given this "foundation", you might suddenly (i.e. instantly) run into someone pointing out quite correctly that if I were to smoke a lot of weed, like 5 ofr 6 joints a day, it might have an effect on a number of people. I'd probably become a real drooling slacker and I wouldn't teach my classes and I'd get fired, and then I'd have no income, and not only would that affect me but it would affect my wife, and it might have an effect on my son. Plus the effect on my employer, and the students in my classes. So you see, it really did ave an effect, and now you have to back peddle and say "Well, we didn't really mean that but what we meant was" and people are bored because you really didn't have anything new to offer people in terms of government. Excuses, excuses: no clearly worked out understanding of rights, and no system of objective law. It's just "you do your thing, I do my thing, and god help us if there's a disagreement about rights because I'm guessing that the biggest shotgun wins. Furthermore, their objection based on the fact that the no-whoring laws encode a particular morality virtually directly asserts that no morality should have the force of law, and therefore no moral judgement, i.e. jurdgement of the properness of an action, is justified. The oft-held objection to murdering people is the encoding of a particular morality, and it is a proper morality. Their failure here is clear -- they fail to distinguish between the wrong morality, and any morality. A society without any morality has no basis for protecting the rights of individuals.

That wasn't the largest load of educationalese I've seen, but it was just enough to remind me why "education" as an academic discipline should be outlawed as a fundamental violation of human rights. I was quite impressed at their ability to provide no information, and use a lot a words to do so. Their defense of Whole Language Education goes like this: "There is a myth that Whole Language Teachers don't teach skills. That's not true. [No evidence given]". And then they procede to explain why Whole Language Teachers reject the myth that teaching skills is important. They seem to do nothing but reject myths. Public education ought to be banished. The problem is, how can parents keep up with the crap that they teach in school? They are entrusting their children's future to trained professionals, right?

Maybe. Their intentions could, deep down, be quite noble. The problem is that they don't go deep down, and until they do, the essential foundation for trusting them is lacking. Bad wording matters, especially if you're going to be in charge of a government which points guns at people's heads. I have your solemn word that despite their bad wording, we can trust them to act properly? Despite their constant bad wording -- their words don't have anything to do with their thinking? The order in which they present their position has no bearing on what they think is actually important? If you say so. They want to protect a woman's right to abortion without admitting that they are pro-abortion? Or are they pro-abortion? Not much of a party of principle if they are afraid of offending some people by saying "Women have a right to abortion, and that right should be protected against religious nut-cases who bomb abortion clinics". Dew whut? (you have to read that with a Florida accent) There are a lot of components to it, such as "what is the law for" and "what does the law say". Literal interpretation and enforcement are essential in a free society governed by objective law, and even non-Objectivists get this. I know that there used to be a group of Objectivist lawyers who I suppose were working in the area of jurisprudence, but they seem to have fallen off the planet. Objective law isn't tricky, but it isn't trivial. Nullification of the law by an uninformed mob is a cheap and poor substitute for actually creating and living by just laws, and is dangerous because jury nullification can go both ways -- an innocent person who violated no rights can be convicted simply because they are, say, too successful in business. Sure, th LP doesn't want that to happen: but by calling for ad hoc "justice" at the whim of 12 angry men, they are opening the floodgates to unjust convictions just as much as to just exhonerations. Or, various people. You seem to cling to a collectivist view of Native Americans. Notice that they don't say "African-Americans are a people who have the historical right to self-determination etc. etc. and their rights should be respected", nor do they say "Norwegian-Americans are a people who have the historical right to self-determination etc. etc. and their rights should be respected", not to mention Polish Americans or Polisho-Norwegio-Lithicranian Americans. Explain the asymmetry, okay? Why should smoking dope or drinking beer not be outlawed? According to them (at least apparently) because they fall into the category of "Activities which do not affect anyone but the actor". Right there, you have the entire moral justification for liberty, and if you can destroy that premise, then the entire LP program is ruined and we will be thrown back to statism. The premise that taking drugs "does not affect anyone else" is false, false, untrue, and not so. It would seriously affect my friends and family if I became a heroin addict. And the premise that rights come from this fictitious non-effect property of drug-taking is false, a lie, untrue, and not so. Fortunately, two wrongs self-cancel so the conclusion that you have the right to take drugs is preserved. Why does it matter that we reduce rights to coherent general principles rather than being an ad-hoc list of shalls and shan'ts? Because one of the principles of (proper) objective law is that the interpretation of the law to new instances is conducted in terms of the purpose of the law. And if you do not have a clear, correct statement of that purpose, yer scrod. I'm bitching about bad wording again. Tell me your opinion of the Welfare clause and the Commerce clause of The Constitution. Why does bad wording matter?

Okay, rather than getting bogged down in the question of whether transpancreatic rationalisationology has any detectable relationship to Objectivism, I'll just address this point directly. Given those two links, your claim is false. Neither document is interesting or thought provoking, and neither is worth taking a look at. I had to figure that out by reading the documents, so to spare others (except Bowzer who already piddled away a bunch of his time with ), I'll just let others know that in my opinion, there is no reason to click either link, and even less reason to read what appears on the screen if you do accidentally click on the link. I think that might be the reason why you don't find any discussion of those guys. However, if anyone is interested, here are other essays along those lines.

If you read the thread and get the tenor of my comments, you'll understand that that was a reductio ad absurdub argument -- that outlawing anything more powerful that a stick of dynamite is statism.

What government rules are you speaking of? There is no question that government interference has driven up the price of health insurance. But exactly how much of the cost of insurance can clearly be attributed to government rules, and how much is because the quality of healthcare has improved dramatically, what with all of those miraculous machines. Before you contemplate stealing medical services, or a loaf of bread, and rationalising it because the government regulates something, you should take careful stock of what exactly you spend your money on.

Okay, so the statements in your initial post about the confusion caused by irregularity was a complete smokescreen with no irrelevance. The putative merit of Esperanto lies in the deluded purpose of creation, as an "International Auxiliary Language", a Euro=speak before the EU was hatched. The fact is that Esperanto is of no use as an international language, since it isn't used, so until you magically change that fact, there really is no merit to Esperanto as any kind of language. Evaluating a language in terms of an intent behinds its origin -- "because of the goal behind it" -- makes no sense. How does phylogeny bear on value for a purpose? [Do you think that language has a purpose?] I mean, unless you think that the purpose of language is to be created for use as an International Auxiliary Language. You should brush up on the details of those languages. You can adopt Chinese as your medium of communication without getting wedded to the characters; over half of those languages do not have tone; and Indonesian is phonetically trivial unlike Esperanto. The consonant system and syllable structure of Esperanto boots it off of the list of choices, for the same reason. Actually, I'd nominate Hawaiian as the best choice for a simple-and-regular language, one which is a couple of orders of magnitude better than Esperanto, in terms of the "simplicity" factor. And what do you mean by this nonsense about "political neutrality?" Esperanto is squarely a highly ethnic and political language -- jeez, if you know a couple of major Western European language or two, you can guess pretty well at what an Esperanto text says. English is vastly less "political" since it's the native language of quite a number of countries, and is the preeminent second language for people to learn. And inside the US, for that matter. But so what? It doesn't matter much what dialect: the two choices are US Standard and UK Standard. Nobody teaches Geordie as a second language, so I figured it wouldn't be necessary for me to say that. You're just deluding yourself if you think that English isn't the default "other language". It is the language for publishing and presenting scientific research, for example; the language for international commerce and diplomacy

There are some problems with their positions, many of which suggest they didn't think the issue through carefully enough. One mistake is that they do not begin by stating what the purpose of government is; rather that start with complaints about bad things that governments do. This is horse-cart inversion. Under Freedom and Responsibility in the summary, the say "Individuals should be free to make choices for themselves and to accept responsibility for the consequences of the choices they make". This is bad wording: nobody denies people the freedom to accept responsibility for their actions, and they (inadvertently?) suggest that taking responsibility is optional. Under Government Secrecy, they assert "We condemn the government's use of secret classifications to keep from the public information that it should have". This would be fine in an idyllic world where nobody violates people's rights, but the fact is that there are nasty people out there trying to blow up the US, and it is sometimes necessary to not reveal everything you know and how you came to know it, in order to stop these plots. Their position on abortion is chicken. They say "Recognizing that abortion is a very sensitive issue and that people, including libertarians, can hold good-faith views on both sides, we believe the government should be kept out of the question". If abortion is murder, government should absolutely prevent abortion; if abortion is not murder, then government should stay out. This good-faith nonsense is, well, nonsense. Their conclusion is sensible only if abortion isn't murder, and they have not make up their minds. They have an incoherent view of law. They say "The common-law right of juries, to judge not only the facts but also the justice of the law, should be recognized and encouraged". This is contrary to the principle that the rule of law should be objective, i.e. they support a whim-based view of justice where unjust laws are not overturned, they are sometimes ignored, if you want. This also contradicts the position set forth in the Executive Summary under Crime: "The appropriate way to suppress crime is through consistent and impartial enforcement of laws that protect individual rights" (emphasis added). Their position on American Indian rights is off the mark: "American Indians should be free to determine their own system of governance and should have their property rights restored". The correct answer is that the government should obey its treat obligations, no more and no less. American Indians should not have the "right" to impose a fascist dictatorship on anyone. The position on government debt -- "We support a constitutional amendment requiring government budgets be balanced by cutting expenditures and not by raising taxes" -- implicitly legitimizes coercive taxation. Their position on Social Security is badly worded: "Replace the fraudulent, bankrupt Social Security system with a private, voluntary system". The word "replace" says that it is the government's business to create such a system. The correct word is "eliminate", and the sentence can be shortened. The position on secession is pretty problematic, as is: "We recognize the right to political secession by political entities, private groups, or individuals". This allows a dictatorship within the US to secede to immunize itself from corrective action by the US government. The Negotiations policy, "The important principle in foreign policy should be the elimination of intervention by the United States government in the affairs of other nations" seems to have merit, except if you consider what "the affairs of other nations" might be. It asserts that the US has no right to protect the rights of US citizens present in foreign countries, and also says that we have no right to defend ourself until the bombs actually land here in the US. This isn't just an omission: the next section says "We call upon the United States government to adhere rigidly to the principle that all U.S. citizens travel, live, and own property abroad at their own risk". Under Victimless Crimes, they say "Activities which do not affect anyone but the actor have been criminalized by government on the basis of encoding a particular morality into law". This totally obscures the point. Pot-smoking "affects" others, and so what. This bizarre standard "it doesn't affect you" is nonsense, and can only confuse people about the nature of rights, and what is a moral vs. immoral action. Under their Conscription section they assert "We call for the immediate and unconditional exoneration of all who have been accused or convicted of draft evasion, desertion from the military in cases of conscription or fraud, and other acts of resistance to such transgressions as imperialistic wars and aggressive acts of the military. Members of the military should have the same right to quit their jobs as other persons". A contract is a contract, and when you enlist for 2 years, you enlist for 2 years. It would be a serious disaster if a platoon suddenly decided, in the middle of a military operation, that they quit.

The sit/sat system used to be regular, but the language has changed to its current irregular state. Your supposition that people do not create irregularity in language is false. Esperanto is irregular in that form-meaning relations are not strictly compositional, cf. the junk derivational suffix -um- giving vento "wind" ~ ventumi "to ventilate"; kolo "neck" ~ kolumo "collar", akvo "water" ~ akvumi "to sprinkle". You have to learn the specific semantics of these relations. That is an example of a non-structural fact. What you're missing is that the ideal that you're striving for is irrelevant to life. You will not be richer or better able to defend yourself from enemies because you've learned a nominally "regular" language. I am aware that there are no first-language speakers of Esperanto. Feel free to introduce me to the counterexample if you believe that one exists. This is the reason why the language will fail. This was not my point, which you apparently did not understand. The myriad properties of the language which Zamenhof failed to specify That assumes that the goal is of some value. You yourself might find it of value to learn a made-up language, but if your interest is in learning a purely "regular" language, Esperanto is an arbitrary choice compared with existing natural languages like Vietnamese, Chinese, Indonesian, Lao, Khmer or Khoe. It fails totally in terms of international useability: try ordering food in a restaurant in Germany using Esperanto. If you want an international language, learn English (bonus: you don't need to learn anything!).

The supposed merit of the language, its morphological regularity, is a small consideration -- people manage to learn the virtual random singular / plural system of Arabic with little problem. It's founded on an a priori and ill-supported notion of what constitutes "difficult" for language. The idea that irregular verbs are a near-universal of human language reflects what you might expect out of someone speaking an Indo-European language, which does have a fair burden of lexical complications. The idea that Esperanto can magically avoid the development of irregularities by fiat and by creating a language currently lacking irregularity is, well, questionable to the billionth power. If he thinks that somehow he can prevent the creation of metaphors and idioms by failing to include metaphors and idioms in the original language, then he's got another thing coming [the aforementioned example is a basically unstoppable process in natural language]. By including any component of inflectional and derivational morphology, Zamenhof sewed the seeds of the destruction of Esperanto, in terms of the supposed no-irregularity property. The reason why Esperanto will fail as a language, and why English will succeed, is that Esperanto is not associated with any specific nation and not associated with any culture or economy. That is why English will win. [Or, Chinese, but that would not be the optimal outcome from my POV]. Languages do not ever succeed for structural reasons -- they succeed because of non-linguistic facts. Like money. Furthermore, there is no reason to think that a simplistic language would be desirable from a market POV. If you want a fake language that has some objective basis for people to select, go for Klingon. It, at least, sounds cool. Until there are numerous real first-language speakers of the language, the very definition of the language is uncertain -- Zamenhof certainly didn't completely specify the language and there are no real first-language speakers who can make the decision in his place. Of course, what they can do is substitute the rules of their own language for whatever is undefined in Zamenhof's version of the language. But these objections aside, the real question is this: why should anyone care about Esperanto?

If you're speaking authoritatively, with knowledge of Canadian legal specifics, that's certainly better that inventing a theory that the government uses its massive customer base to negotiate a lower price, as Kyle said. This is analogous to price controls on tobacco and alcohol in Ohio, where the state declares a minimum price (maximum prices are not an issue). You aren't entitled to assume anything here: if you don't know, then you don't know. You can even reasonably assume that Canadian law specifies a fine for violating price regulations. Which is it? Whichever it is, it does not negate the fact that these drug manufacturing companies have no right to use government force to prevent me from doing with my personal property as I want, once I acquire such property. Their only proper recourse is to prevent me from acquiring the drugs, by refusing to sell to me. When I buy the stuff, it is mine, mine, all mine, to do with as I want. That was a bit of a misstatement. The right to the idea exist as a floating abstraction which no specific consequences, until the specific nature of the right is secured by a law. The reasons for differentiating IP rights and ownership of goods are discussed in CUI in the chapter "Patents and Copyrights". Ideas cannot be consumed, physical books can. IP rights cannot be held in perpetuity, unlike physical property rights. Patents especially need to be restricted in scope because they infringe on other people's rights to act on their recognition of reality, and to enjoy the product of their mental effort.

Well, I think it is that simple. Drugs are a good which is sold: ownership is transfered, and transfered unconditionally. The valid of your objection is valid, and that is the reason why there are patent laws. Making it an issue of property rights and supposing that drug companies have some kind of extraordinary rights after their goods are sold is wrong. Even if you wanted to try to make control over where drugs can be taken once they are sold into a contractual issue, they don't make you sign a "I won't take these drugs into the US" agreement. Uh, this sounds like it's going to become the "Wal-Mart is coersive because it's so big" argument. You wouldn't do that, right? Leverage is non-coercive. Well, if the Canadian government holds itself above the rule of law, that is not good, but until they actually do violate the law, this is a non-argument. The manufacturers have a choice to withdraw from that market, a right which they have not exercised: this is the primary consideration. They have the right to sell at a higher price, which have have not chosen to do. But their desires are irrelevant. They should simply withdraw from the Canadian market entirely. You can't have it both ways. The argument from threat is potentially valid, but you have to establish that there is an actual threat. Can you establish this? I don't mean, can you invent an Atlas Shrugged scenario where the Canadians nationalise a drug company For The Benefit Of The People, I mean, can you point to actual acts by the Canadian government which inescapably show that the drug companies have been threatened with a specific coercive action? Also note that the drug manufacturers do not have the same property right to the idea that they have to the product. The former right only exists by dint of a particular statute granting the patent-holder exclusive rights to exploit the idea for a specific period of time. So if you want to argue that Canada has threatened manufacturers with violation of their rights, you have to establish what those rights are under Canadian law.

Maybe and maybe not. There can be laws against anything, but even without a statute against trespass, you can sue for trespass on the grounds that there has been damage. The distinction is that criminal trespass is an offense against the state but civil trespass is an offense against private property. Pretty uniformly. Well, "reneging on a deal" is another way of saying that a contract has been broken. So more or less by definition, it is a civil matter and not a criminal matter. It's doing wrong to a person, not the state -- though the state holds that a number of wrong-doings against individuals intrinsically harm society, thus damage the state. It would be a bit draconian to make all contractual disputes criminal offenses. What makes something criminal is that there is a law against it. It's an interesting question whether making a contract with the (provable) intent to not perform is criminal fraud -- seems to me it is, but mebbe not. Once the drug is sold, it is sold. What you're describing is really licensing, not purchase, and as far as I know, no end-user licenses drugs. So there is no requirement that you only consume the drugs in Canada, for example (and thus any restrictions on bringing drugs into the US from Canada do not protect the rights of the manufacturer.

Now the trivia question: why is it named King County?

Well, they aren't environmentalists, they are county bureaucrats enforcing a dumb state law passed by dumb state bureaucrats, who were acting in a manner that they believed reflected The Will of The People. And in the abstract, it might well be the will of those people, until you frame it as "That means you can't build a lean-to on your lot". The values that they are enforcing are "obediance to the law" -- I don't know that this case particularly reflects specific values of the councilmen.

It's a horrid idea. The real proposal is to add a national VAT. Pretending that they might eliminate the income tax is just the candy that these vermin are sprinkling on the proposal to make it seem nice: there is not one reason to believe that the income tax will go away. Read my lips, no new taxes.

You might want to consult an attorney first, to see what the exact penalties would be for doing this. Or you could try to get permission from the instructor, to avoid that problem. A legal way you could do this would be to write a critical summary of the course (something of your own creation); if it is good, people might be willing to pay for it.

The point is that that "A is A" is the law of non-contradiction. They are not at all different. So why bother listing it twice?

I don't exactly get the point. Formally, you don't need => or <=> (if you're looking for minimalist notation, all you need is the Sheffer stroke). My objection to your examples labeled "philosophical meaning of the tautology" is that they are really not equivalent to the symbolic formulae. For example "A <=> A" may be translated into an expression like "A is A", but this is really not the same as the fundamental axiom of Objectivism, as explained in Galt's speech for example. "A is A" -- as Galt articulates it, says "You cannot have your cake and eat it, too" and therefore the Law of Non-Contradiction is not separate. Interestingly, while your 3 is correct as a metaphysical statement, it is untrue epistemologically -- not all statements are either true or false (cf. the discussion of arbitrary statements -- ones with no truth value). Your 5th statement is also unneeded -- if x is true, then x is true, and I really don't care about y. In addition, you make liberal -- and standard misuse, so you're not being bad -- of "=>" which means enough different things in formal logic that it should be banned. (It is used as the formal fudge for mentioning context but also is used to mean "causes", and you also use it to mean "is evidence that"). I would urge you to focus on the notion "causation", and forget the other uses. The concrete examples of reasoning would be most useful to focus on -- the formalism does not clarify anything. But a number of them have problems. For example, a propos the idea that "Not untrue" means "true", in English saying that something is "Not untrue" does not mean that it is true, it means that there is reason to think it is true, but it's not at all certain. And in Russian (and Croatian?) "Ja ne znaju nichego" means "I know nothing", despite the double negation -- in other words, you need to distinguish language rules and principles of reasoning. In 5, the first statement -- "I love the works of Ayn Rand" -- makes it unnecessary to try to conclude that you love the works of Ayn Rand. Do you have some examples where keeping in mind certain tautologies does help with reasoning? For the life of me, I can't think of any. What I think helps the most is just paying attention to what you're actually saying. Like if you claim that "All crows are black" then it means that you're claiming that you won't ever find a non-black crow (and if you do, you will know that you were mistaken).

Given how deeply the Baath party tentacles permeated the state in Iraq, I think complete destruction of all government in Iraq outside of Kurdistan was necessary. Kurdistan, on the other hand, had a stable and marginally acceptable government. You really need to be more specific about what you mean by destroying all hotbeds of Islamic activism. For example, incinerating the whole country in a huge nuclear fireball would destroy all traces of Islam and anything else, so that might be a bit extreme. How about bombing all mosques into rubble, and arresting all clerics? These would be counterproductive actions in the long run. But the elimination of Islam (along with other religions, but Islam especially) is the most important element in the equation. Confiscating the oilfields would not accomplish anything in this context: it would make sense only when coupled with guaranteed control. When the Baathist government was destroyed, their control of the oilfields was ended. If you have in mind not just non-control by the Baath party, but actually giving the oilfields to Shell and BP (picking two random companies -- surely somebody must have decent historical records to see who if anyone has a legal claim), that's all well and fine except that since under a POG these companies would not have the right to form an army to protect their new property, then either the US has to permanently occupy Iraq, or we have to install a rights-respecting government (the latter is the right solution). This assumes that the Iraqi oilfields have to be under western control. Another option is to call upon the government of Kurdistan to protect the northern fields; or let them lie fallow until civilization returns. I would favor those two solutions. Until somebody comes up with a magical way to destroy tyrannies without loss of American lives and wasting huge amounts of money, we should not invade and overthrow tyrannical governments unless they are actively working to attack us. We need an unambiguous and loudly articulated policy regarding attacks on America, and such policy statements can be delivered from afar by missle. So maintaining bases in Iraq would not be necessary to prevent attacks. In the long run, it is not in our rational self-interest to keep the Mideast crazies under tight control: it is in our self-interest to eliminate them from the face of the Earth. The key to that is the elimination of irrational Islamic influence, and to convert the crazies to rational beings.

So basically what you mean is that actual Wal-Mart and an exact scaled-down version of Wal-Mart differ in their overhead (to the disadvantage of Small-Mart), and therefore the latter's costs are higher, thus either their prices must be higher or their profitability must be lower. Now there are a few other factors to include. First, the administrative overhead of Small-Mart may be lower (the boss also works the register and does accounting, etc and the boss of Small-Mart requires much less money to be a happy guy because he enjoys the work). Second, there is the irrationality factor -- very few people reject Small-Mart because it is a large store, and many people patronise Small-Mart because they went to high school with the owner, or because it is a "small, local" business. Third, I picked up 500 9x12 mailing envelopes at the local office supply at a fraction of the price, because they got a deal on a stray couple of boxes of about a thousand from a salvage place -- OfficeMax doesn't deal in such spontaneous tiny bargins. And fourth, the "specialty" aspect can be really important. In fact, I think the failure to recognise this last fact is the main failing of (some) modern small business. You cannot run a Ma and Pa drug store the same way your grandparents did. You need something that distinguishes you from the competitors, big or small, and cannot just rely on tradition to carry you through. When you understand what it is that gives you the competitive edge, then the fact that you're a fraction the size of Wal-Mart is irrelevant.

Well, as long as you aren't claimed as a dependent on anyone's income taxes, don't make any money, and don't have a bank account, I think it's unnecessary.

Hmmm. I did say that, didn't I. Musta been early in the morning. Okay, let me put it differently. The word "relationship" is used in two ways. The metaphysical connection (no pun intended, exactly) between my foot and me isn't mental, it is real. But I mentally grasp that connection. So the mental grasp and the metaphysical connection are different (but not unrelated or unconnected). In the above context with the emphasis on propositions, what this guy (apparently) is talking about is the understanding of reality, and not the facts (I guess: that's why conceptual parsimony is important when speaking of "truth"). This is one of the perils of abstract word-game philosophy: without relating claims to actual existents, it's nigh onto impossible to really know what somebody means. In the above case, the relation is mental, being the "understanding of reality" (and the fact that the two people have the same understanding).

Your conclusion does not follow from the fact that different sentences in different languages can mean the same thing. What they have is common is reality: two sentences mean the same thing if and only if they refer to the same metaphysical state of affairs. That real-word condition is grasped inside the mind in terms of a proposition, which may be expressed by various sentences. Why not? Propositions are founded on concepts, and express relations between concepts. This is all entirely mental. Relationships are mental: they are the product of recognition of facts. If you're unclear on how the mind grasps external facts, we could have a separate discussion on perception, but I assume the overall mapping between the external world and the mind is somewhat familiar to you. The replicability of concepts is implicit on the nature of concepts: they are mental integrations that subsume a class of existents. This mean that you can identify this as an apple and that as an apple, despite any different sizes and colors, because of their nature.

Okay, I'd like to see a bit more detail in your argument. It seems to me that you're holding the Constitution, vs. the government, to different standards. The Constitution allows the invasive statism that exists at present, but it does not require it. The Constitution thus has clearly failed -- though I think unpredictably so -- because it allows the current socialism and statism that pervades America. The limits on governmental power spelled out in the Constitution are really minimal. The Constitution does not articulate a clear vision of individual liberty and capitalism -- just consider the Welfare clause and the Commerce clause, and what hell has been visited on us because of them. I don't entirely blame the framers (not having the specific historical knowledge needed to make such a judgment). But the fact of the matter is, the Constitution should have contained Anti-Welfare and Un-Commerce clauses which directly state that these are not the concern of the government. There's no question that the people in government have to take the rap for the fact that we have such attrocities as the Taft-Hartley Act: but equally, the Constitution has to take the rap for allowing these laws. Now: if you have an argument that there are acts performed by the state in clear violation of the Constitution, then that's worth pursuing (and cc Scalia, just in case he decides to care). We really need to see the argument that the actions of the government undeniably violate the Constitution.