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Found 3 results

  1. Immigration is generally beneficial. It usually adds to a nation's economic wealth and military strength, and even to its intellectual power and cultural riches. Unfortunately, everyone in the world today lives in a Welfare State. This is a kind of 'moderate', collectivist tyranny, which could also be described as semi-lawlessness, featuring a permanent civil war between residents, or a Hobbesian "war of all against all". Theft from, and coercion of, one's neighbors is rampant. Big Brother is everywhere nowadays. So it matters how predatory and efficaciously warlike any potential new immigrants will be. Competent parasites and powerful civil warriors aren't desirable. Thus today only the good people should be allowed in to a high-quality nation. Only the cream of the world's crop. The bad people, in turn, should be assiduously kept out. Indeed, the good would-be immigrants should be positively recruited. Maybe even rewarded or bribed for coming over. "Good" means those who enhance the quality of life of the nation. Those who add to the material wealth and raise the level of civilization, etc. Specifically, immigrants to a superior country should be workers -- especially hard and smart ones -- and not thieves/criminals or welfarist beggars. Any such social parasites and nation-destroyers should be disallowed and deported -- even those of long-time citizenship. The highly religious, self-sacrificial, and welfare statist should also be forbidden. People of bad philosophy almost always undermine a nation's culture, lifestyle, and spirit, among other things. "Good" also means the healthy, wealthy, comely, intelligent, well-educated, virtuous, rational, individualist, and freedom-loving. Also those who will quickly learn the language, adopt most of the culture, and become a patriot. A proper, good, and wise immigration policy will forthrightly forbid or expel all traitorous, bigoted lowlifes back to the primitive, corrupt, socialist hellholes whence they came.
  2. What explains the recent radical increase in income inequality in America and the West over the past few generations? Why is the middle class shrinking so rapidly? Why is the upper class becoming so superrich? Why does the upper 2% own the majority of the private wealth in America? What is the standard and accepted Objectivist explanation for all of this? My reading of history indicates that ever since the advent of the nation-state 5000 years ago, about 95% of the populace has been lower class peasants, with maybe 3% middle class tradesmen and skilled laborers, and maybe 2% upper class political and religious leaders who mostly got their money via economic monopoly, inheritance, land seizure, general theft, dictatorship, etc. But once freedom, capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution began in the mid-1700s, the middle class burgeoned in Western Civiliation. Wealth accumulated and grew radically in the middle class for two centuries -- seemingly a social good. (But is it?) And yet, starting in about the 1960s, wealth began to accumulate in the upper class, while the absolute size of the middle class shrank from maybe 80% to 65%, and while the relative wealth of the middle class also declined. The lower class also increased in size, and their relative share of the national wealth also declined. Now, this is a quick summary of Western economics, but I think I'm being fair and accurate. (If not, someone please correct me!) So... Why is all this happening? Why is this new social evil upon us (if it is, based on Thomas Sowell's "cosmic justice") which is so inimical to freedom, and which lends itself so well to pro-Big Brother rhetoric and ideology? Why is the standard nonsensical socialist/communist claim of "the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer" suddenly true? Clearly this has something to do with the radical expansion of the welfare state from WWI to the 1960s. But what is the detailed and insightful explanation for this? What is the current best libertarian or Objectivist explanation for it?
  3. Last night (August 28, 2012) New Jersey governor Chris Christie gave the Keynote Address to the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. Gov. Christie didn't mention or praise: freedom, liberty, individual rights, justice, capitalism, libertarianism, laissez-faire, free enterprise, or free trade. So too: Ayn Rand, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Milton Friedman, Henry Hazlitt, Ludwig von Mises, or Friedrich Hayek. He also didn't mention or condemn: slavery, tyranny, totalitarianism, authoritarianism, communism, socialism, fascism, welfare statism, Big Gov't, or Big Brother. So too: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, John Maynard Keynes, John Kenneth Galbraith, Saul Alinsky, Joseph Stiglitz, or Paul Krugman. He did, however, praise his mother for saying people have to "choose between being loved and being respected." And he noted that you the voter should "fight for your principles." His best line was about the need for America to "cut federal spending and reduce the size of gov't." But Christie also praised New Jerseyians who "shared in the sacrifice"; and he condemned those who were "selfish," and believed in "every man for himself," and who think "self-interest will always trump common sense." What an advocate of self-sacrifice, and what enemy of political liberty! People who vote for Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan and the Republicans this year are truly attackers of freedom and destroyers of America!
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