What is important to us is to reverse the shameful course being pursued by America. It won't be easy, but it must and can be done.

What's called Obamacare is an effort to mildly change this [health-care system], not change it as far as it should go or as much as the population wants it to go, but to make it a little better and a little more affordable.

The House of Representatives, which was closer to the population, had much less power. The executive was more or less an administrator, not an emperor like today.

The shutdown itself is bad but not devastating. The real danger will come up in a couple of weeks. There's legislation which is in fact routine - it's passed every year - which allows the government to borrow money, otherwise it can't function. If Congress does not approve this budget request, the government may have to default.

There's a strong nativist tradition - saying, "we have to protect ourselves" - that comes from the founding of the country. If you read Benjamin Franklin, who was one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment in the United States and the most distinguished representative of the movement here, he actually advised that the newly founded republic should block Germans and Swedes because they were too "swarthy" - dark.

After all, the internet originated around 1960 and wasn't privatized until 1995. That's thirty five years in the public domain during the hard, creative development period.

Democracy, in any rational form, also imposes conditions on majority rule. That's what the Bill of Rights is about, for example.