Flame — HabitableZone

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Re: Danger zone
Tom Brosz — (archived)

Well, you've got to admit our European posters do tend to think that when the government says "jump," you need to ask "how high?"

Lee is slightly over the redneck edge sometimes in his commentary, but with the inflammatory rhetoric trimmed off, he has a small valid point: over hundreds of years, the most ambitious, entrepreneurial, and above all, anti-authoritarian Europeans did tend to head for America*. Same goes for the rest of the world. However, that's not the whole story by a long shot. Many immigrants were also people on their last legs or people being persecuted who were not particularly eager to leave, but had nowhere else to go. And a lot of immigrants were fleeing authorities, sometimes for good reasons. Look how Australia started out.

Not everybody who came to the U.S. as an immigrant was a John Galt wannabe, or even just the "salt of the earth." But they were mostly good, hard working people. This is still largely true for modern immigrants, although we are also getting more than our share of people who not only think the streets are paved with gold, but think that someone should dig them up for them and hand them the gold on a platter.

*A theory here in the U.S. is that the same natural selection applied to East Coast types who got sick of being pushed around and headed West. This explanation falls a little flat when you think about the People's Republic of California though. Seems here that most of the independent minded types wound up in the Rocky Mountain states.

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