The Constitution of Government in Galt's Gulch by Wolf Devoon (Amazon here www.amazon.com/The-Constitution-Governme...) reveals the cognitive context of the man who wrote the document. Devoon is a lawyer. Like many Objectivists, he was drawn to yet another new country project. This one consumed about $10 million, spent in Peru, and then Costa Rica. It ran for about a year and ran successfully (if that is not stretching the meaning) for about six months. Operationally, the "community" of traders was in cyberspace, protected by walls of cryptography. To make that work, a handful of adventurers, investors, and shady characters established a physical base of operations. Devoon wrote this constitution for that confederated chain of homes, houses, and compounds.

The actual text of the charter runs about ten pages (pp. 127 - 136), about half of those being commentary on the five Articles. Leading up to that Devoon explains his relationship to equity, private morality, capitalism, divorce, the rights of children, bankruptcy and fraud, and the death of industrial civilization. It seems like a long walk - and the narrative includes one of those, to Ayrshire, Scotland. But it is a walk with a companion who devotes deep thought to common problems. And after the walk, you two have brandy and coffee by a fireplace.

Devoon is a lawyer in a technological society, an information age. Jeremy Bentham offered a T-Account ledger for his hedonism. Devoon relies on an infinite series from algebra. Your most important value should weigh more than the sum of all subsidiary values, each one half of the one above. 10, 5, 2.5, 1.25, 0.625,… Devoon's primary value is artistic achievement. It outweighs physical comfort, social approval, helping others, political power, a place in history, and telling jokes. That these are probably not your values - they are not mine - does not change the power of the method. If your values are rightly defined, no lesser one can jump to the fore and dominate the others, claiming a short-term benefit in sacrifice of your lifelong integrity.

And Devoon is a man of deep integrity. In The Fountainhead, Howard Roark tells Gail Wynand that for most people integrity is just keeping your hand out of your neighbor's pocket. Integrity is loyalty to an idea. For Devoon, that idea is the rule of law.

Plans to start new communities, and even entire new nations, are iconic to the libertarians who were deeply influenced by Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Rand's "Utopia of Greed", hidden in the Colorado Rockies, only echoed a long tradition in American history, beginning with America itself. The City on a Hill, the City of God, drew the leaders of a million dreamers, from the Puritans and Quakers to the Shakers and Mormons, and the New Hampshire Free State Project today. California's Utopian Colonies by Robert V. Hine (1953) went through several editions because the subject is compelling. How to Start Your Own Country by Erwin S. Strauss (Loompanics, 1980) chronicled (failed) libertarian ventures and contrasted them to Sealand, the English pirate radio station that ruled the wave(length) in defiance of Britannia.

Laissez Faire City was yet another failed attempt. The constitution for this Galt's Gulch established courts of law, and nothing more. In the paragraphs and pages that follow Devoon nods to a single police force - allowing that other private firms could operate under the same body of law. He also acknowledges the possibility of competing courts - again, under the same laws. He grants the utility of a single army funded by a single revenue stream of shareholders, leaving unresolved the problem of the free rider.

This is not a book for someone in need of All the Answers. It does deliver Many of the Questions, most of them in form of narratives, slices of life from the experience of one person who took the time to look around with open eyes and think about his perceptions.

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