02/03/26
I have written a post, but on submission it disappeared and the text was lost. In brief, I have written an article on the Anthemism website in which I quoted from Harry Binswanger's post that started this thread. My article "The Texas Border Case Study" begins thus,
Many who consider themselves reasonable hold that a terrible thing happened during the Biden years: the handling of the Texas border. Of the total migrants coming through this border, about 2.5 million were allowed to enter, and 1.5 million more, known as "gotaways", got through without documents. However, the Anthemism initiative advocates for open borders, and this episode serves as a case study. From the initiative's perspective, the inflow through the Texas border was the best thing that happened during the Biden administration.
https://anthemism.org/article/texas-border-migrants/
If anyone wants to help me fill the Anthemism website with more content of similar nature, please contact me.
02/07/26
In the book The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure by John Allison, I read that banks had no freedom to refuse mortgages to people who couldn't possibly make the payments. This pertains to the period that Gordon describes as the deregulated period (late 1990s and up to the crisis). But it wasn't deregulated, it was regulated differently.
02/07/26
Gorgon Gregory writes that limiting immigration is the necessary solution to stopping Islam from taking over the country. I don't see any problem with Muslim immigrants, as long as they have (a) no voting rights, and no possibility to hold political office for N generations since immigration; (b) any criminal activity is severely punished and the punishments made public, justifying them ideologically; and, (c) there are spies infiltrating muslim communities to detect and expose cells early, to free any people trapped by Islam as in cases in which brothers threatening their sister for not wearing a hijab or for wearing a miniskirt. But UK, nay Europe, has failed to implement all of these requirements.
Objectivists need to advocate for the right thing to do, not the pragmatic thing to do. Otherwise, we are playing into the hands of our ideological enemies. Open the borders, but at the same time, crack down on crime justified by Islam. Soon, Islam will change out of fear.
This happened to early Judaism after the Roman war: anyone who was crazy enough to rebel against Rome was dead, and those who remained (Yohanan ben Zakkai) sat down (at Yavneh) and modified Judaism to be friendly to Rome. Out of this war two things were born: the new Judaism and Christianity. Both were variants of the same program — to change the ideology of the local population.
02/08/26
I suggested a method to handle large Muslim immigration. I also wrote an extensive article on this on Anthemism website titled Facing the Challenges of Muslim Immigration. In a nutshell, a high level of monitoring is needed to absorb and reform the Islam that Muslims bring with them, and which they follow.
Gordon writes:
This sounds to me like creating a police state and pseudo-apartheid in order to manage immigration. This goes back to the question of how to govern a tyrannically minded people. It would go against all of our principles.
In what way does it go against any Objectivist political philosophy? A government's job is to keep peace in the country. We have probable cause — it is widely known that a woman who acts not according to Sharia law is risking being murdered by her very own family. Because this happens behind doors, a spy network is needed to infiltrate the whole community.
These people cannot reform while they stay in their home countries. They must come to freedom, to see and experience that there is another way. And even when they are ready to exit, they need a safe path to walk to leave their own communities.
One may ask — why should my country help those people? Let them rot in their countries with their hopeless lives. But he has no right to make this claim. It's not his country, it is not his home (an idea often heard from Right), and it is not his call to make. A country is a political system designed to let individuals live close by without stepping on each other's toes. A country, therefore, must have mechanisms to accomplish this for anyone who wants to live in it.
Any time you have two individuals trying to live close by, there needs to be a system. Even a husband and a wife quarrel, notwithstanding that they married after spending a decade finding a matching person. What can be said of two random people who happen to want to live close by? There will be a lot of conflict between them, and a system is needed to help them do so. That's what a country is.
Also, Gordon critiques my statements about early Judaism. There were the Sicarii who murdered Romans and Jews deemed not devout enough. Earlier, the Hasmonean kings conquered nearby territories and force-converted the conquered people to Judaism, particularly the Idumeans. (One such force-converted was Herod's grandfather.)
We can also go to the Torah / Pentateuch, particularly the story of the killer Phinehas. This Jew killed a fellow Jew for loving a non-Jewish woman. There are also the entries in Numbers of how Moses commands to kill women and children of conquered people.
02/08/26
Gordon argues in favor of regulations. He says that repealing regulations caused the 2008 crisis. This amounts to saying that people cannot be trusted to make good decisions, they must be in shackles. This is a philosophy of the Middle Ages, the Original Sin.
For the particular example cited, because banks must make money too, it is the reason for them to charge higher interest rates. They need to make money to pay for their offices and staff, and also to pay interest to the depositors. So the interest rates are not set on a whim, but based on what the bank can get away with charging. If there were a prior deficit in the 90s, because of the sub-prime mortgage policy, it's understandable why banks want to make up the difference to balance their books.
But, as John Allison reveals, another regulation forced banks to grant higher interest mortgages to people who couldn't possibly pay them. Hence the 2008 crisis. When you have regulations, someone will get burned. Does it matter who, the lenders or the borrowers (it's usually both)? Is it better that banks give out sub-prime mortgages on which they can't make their ends meet?
It's difficult to choose a lesser evil, and we shouldn't. Let either the lenders or the borrowers crash and burn until they get a clue why they are in such a miserable state. If the people want statism, they will have to pay the consequences. Objectivists must advocate for a principled policy, and stop trying to save these people from themselves.
And as for the open borders: if the country can't operate properly under an inflow of immigrants, it has no right to exist. Let it fall apart, and reform anew.