The Outstater

August 4, 2026

America: An Idea or Just a Place?

THERE IS A DEBATE swirling around the candidacy of Vivek Ramaswamy, the GOP candidate for governor in neighboring Ohio. It is whether America is an idea or just a place. We can resolve it right here.

“America isn’t a place, it’s an idea.” Vivek Ramaswamy, July 1, 2021

First, as Vivek maintains, it is an idea, an incredibly successful idea, one that has proven so throughout the world for those peoples who have tried it.

Second, that idea was incubated in places, primarily of Anglo-Saxon heritage, where the sanctity of private property and rule by laws and not by men came to be adopted — so called “natural” laws that can be neither awarded nor denied by any legislature or court, king or president.

“And if (as an American) you reject that idea, then we don’t have a country left.” — Vivek Ramaswamy, Dec. 23, 2022

Both can be true at the same time, as when that idea is applied to places such as Singapore or more recently Argentina. Our Declaration of Independence spells it out for both those who would like to come here and for those who would like to try the idea in their own place.

Short of war, neither argument justifies crossing a border, refusing to assimilate and imposing the ideology of the place from which you emigrated.

Now, can we get back to weeding Indiana’s own tangle of laws and regulations before it becomes a place where personal liberty and the entrepreneurial spirit are squelched to a point Hoosiers start looking for somewhere else to go? — tcl

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