db, please read again. What part of the following do you and several others fail to understand from The Virtue of Selfishness?

"A free nation—a nation that recognizes, respects and protects the individual rights of its citizens— has a right to its territorial integrity, its social system and its form of government."

Your unwillingness to recognize this point was my main reason for starting this thread.

The point of my thread is clearly quoted from The Virtue of Selfishness directly. Multiple Gulchers are saying that nations have no rights, when Ayn Rand clearly said they do have some limited rights. The context is The Radio: Interrupted discussion from Friday.

You would seem to be saying only a country granting explicit allodial title over all but the common lands to private individuals and entities, is a fit agent of free citizens and has any right to wage war. Do I understand you correctly?

From the above, follows the proposition that a non-free nation-state has no right to territorial respect. She further said any country that commits four specific atrocities against its subjects--execution without trial, detention without formal charge, restriction on ex-migration, and censorship--deserves invasion at the hand of any free nation having the capacity and will so to act.

Hear, hear

What "Gulchers" are you talking about? There is no statist "right" for a "nation" to "self determine" what "it" wants, whether by dictator or tribalism. The "rights" of a nation are no more than the rights of individuals to establish and keep a free society. That is the "sovereign nation" she referred to. Anyone has a right to invade or subvert a statist government anywhere in the world to overthrow the statists for a freer society..

I would think that an entrance exam, if you will, be imposed, plus a vetting if the person is not a public figure. This can be done by citizens volunteering their time and retirees wanting to be of service..

I would add, so as to limit confusion, we are talking about a Free Nation.

It is a point of fact that any collective Objectivist territory, like any other Utopian concept, can only exist with the use of lethal force against any who would try to enter without permission, such permission requiring sworn allegiance to Objectivist principles. Pure Objectivism can't rationally exist, so a rational Objectivist must determine how to best promote his ideals within a government that allows the most individual freedom, and how to persuade that government to favor his principles as more beneficial than more collectivist ideologies.

Idealistically speaking, all people should have all the rights We The People used to have.

AS I have indicated in the past -- there you go, getting all rational on us.

Huh?

If you can't understand that, you must delegate yourself to being an Admirer of Rand, but not an Objectivist. That is so intrinsic to her philosophy, that without it, it ceases to be Objectivism.

Yes

Wtf?

This

What is the point of your thread? What "understanding of Objectivism" do you claim "a majority of Gulchers either have never read or have chosen to ignore it because it does not fit their understanding of Objectivism" and what do you claim who is substituting? You only provided one out of context statement from Ayn Rand.

J,

The passage is clear that people have rights and that nations do not have rights. When we speak of the rights of a nations, we are talking about the rights of the people that make up that nation.

Realize that you are not disagreeing with me on this point. You are disagreeing with Rand. She was referring to geo-political bounded nations inhabited by free men. In fact, if you read The Virtue of Selfishness from which the quotes come, you will see that she specifically delineated nations to which those rights do not apply (Soviet Union, Cuba, dictatorships).

You have claimed to be an Objectivist. If you reject the point of this thread, then while I disagree with you, I must applaud you for having come to this conclusion on your own, instead of just following Objectivist orthodoxy.

1) First of all, any comparison that I made in previous posts between Galt's Gulch and a nation were part of an ongoing assessment of whether or not it was feasible to start my own micronation, much like Midas Mulligan did. When my father passes on, I will have financial ability to do that to a quite limited extent. At this point, though some other Gulchers have expressed interest, this interest is insufficient for me to think that it is in my self-interest to make such an Atlantis happen. I may change my mind as new opportunities present themselves.

2) I am assessing whether or not such an Atlantis would be self-destructive or not. At this point, I have to conclude that it would be. If just anyone has the right to enter a nation I would create, then I know that such a nation will not work in this era.

3) If, in the process of new opportunities presenting themselves, I run across a Midas Mulligan, I am gathering data to present a business plan in conjunction with several others to present to Mulligan. If my result from 2) continues to be as it is, I will not be able to present such a business plan in good conscience.

As I learn about objectivism, one of the most important principles I see is that there is a real, objective world capable of perception and able to be analyzed by reason. Hence the term "objectivism".

One of the objective things one can determine by studying reality is that not everyone agrees philosophically. Reason indicates that this is likely to continue. Another thing that one can observe is that the majority can, by the initiation of force, impose its will on the minority if it is not inhibited in doing so. You may have binding documents and agreements inhibiting it from doing this but if a sufficient majority of the population can be convinced, they will implement a "new deal" and the old deal will be ignored.

A consequence of this is that it is not sufficient that a nation founded on Objectivist principles form a government constrained by those principles, it must also, somehow, assure that the people who believe in those principles remain a sufficiently large percentage of the population that they can maintain the integrity of those constraints.

This is one of the reasons the fictional gulch was hidden and controlled access. Because it was obvious that if the looters could enter in numbers, they would impose their own philosophy by force of arms.

This remains an issue.

And now Ayn Rand is not an objectivist.

In any attempt to understand or incorporate statements or even phrases in those statements made by Ayn Rand in the years after Atlas Shrugged in which she fleshed out her philosophy of Objectivism, one must first apply the 'first principles' of Objectivism.

These attempts to find within AR's statements, justification or rationalization for beliefs in exclusionary border controls and the application of pre-emptive force to individuals arriving at those borders, can only be pursued by denying (or misunderstanding) the 'first principles' of Objectivism (which is egoistic and individualistic), or by attempting to work backwards from a desired conclusion, illogically.

One of the best examples of the above is the previous posts' comparison of 'Galt's Gulch' and a nation (the U.S.) and attempts to derive from that, justification for an exclusionary and preemptively forcable immigration activity. The two entities bear no comparable identity. Galt's Gulch was private property of Midas Mulligan working with John Galt to 'hide' it's existence from the rest of the world, and intended to be and operate as a refuge for the productive of the world. Galt and the other operatives of 'The Gulch' operated well within the Objectivist ideals of 'property rights' of an individual in their invitations to selected others and in selling or renting portions of Gulch property to those others, including mutually recognized and accepted contractual obligations and terms.

That description bears no resemblance to a geo-political, bounded nation, inhabited by 'free men' owning or renting their own private property with the right to change their properties and locals, and providing for their mutual defense a government for the strict purposes of applying retributive force against jurisdictional violators of individual rights, and against extra-territorial violators of those same individual rights and freedoms. Such government and government actors are restricted by Objectivist thought and by the Constitution of the US, to only retributive force, while preventive force is only available to individuals exercising properly understood private property rights derived from individual and natural rights.

The basis for the moral outrage by Gulchers to US interventionist foreign policy is that its "right to self-determination" is in conflict with the other nation's (or nations') right to self-determination. This is why Rand included the last phrase in The Virtual of Selfishness quote, "and a right to demand that its sovereignty be respected by all other nations."