I’m No Radical

Nullification isn’t radical, either. From my latest column at the Tenth Amendment Center:

Standing up and saying ‘no!’ when a group of sociopaths tries to commit a crime is not radical at all. Standing by and saying ‘yes!’ is the truly radical act. Just so we’re clear about terms, synonyms for radical are extreme, wild, or violent. Those just as easily describe the act of corralling human beings into stables like livestock and interring them indefinitely in prison camps. There’s nothing moderate, tame, or passive about declaring certain people to be sub-human and without rights, placing them in chains, and forcing them to return to labor as beasts of burden. And what other way is there to describe the act of marching men, women and children 2,200 miles at gun point into foreign land?

As might be expected, advocates of personal liberty are often smeared with the label “radical.” The reality is that libertarians aren’t radical at all, it’s quite the opposite.

Reject the premise that people who want to be left alone are the radicals. Turn the accusation around, and place that label where it belongs — with those who want to control other human beings and are okay with using brutality to that end.

Libertarianism and Secession

Libertarianism.org published a piece by Jonathan Blanks back in February, and for whatever reason, it made its way around Facebook yesterday with several groups debating its contents. In the article Blanks challenges the argument made by some libertarians that Southern secession was justified on libertarian grounds. Now I’ll agree that defending Southern secession can become tricky for a libertarian given a) most people’s relative misunderstanding of the events leading up to and during the war; and b) the motives of Southern politicians regarding the institution of slavery.

However, Blanks’ overall argument – that states may not secede – is not compelling overall. Virtually his entire argument is couched on the issue of slavery, which works when discussing the War Between the States, but falls apart when applied to other cases.

Imagine slavery wasn’t an issue at all, and the people of Vermont decided to secede and become their own Socialist republic. Where is Blanks to go now regarding secession?

The second issue I have is that he invokes Article I, section 8 of the constitution in reference to the Feds using the military to put down insurrections. The problem with this argument is that secession and insurrection are two separate issues. In the first case one subset of a larger group wants to leave and become their own entity; in the second case one subset wants to gain control of the entire body.

This is why calling the War Between the States a “civil war” is a misnomer. The south never attempted to capture the US Capitol and take over the federal government. They merely said “we quit.” And, since the states created the federal union, the states can leave the federal union. A more accurate description of the war is “the war against southern independence,” or “the war of Northern aggression,” as Thomas DiLorenzo refers to them in his books The Real Lincoln and Lincoln Unmasked.

Finally, a note on slavery: had the south been permitted to secede, the institution of slavery would have immediately been under enormous pressure, since slaves could flee to the north and seek asylum. This would have driven the cost of slavery well above its productive limits, and with the mechanization of agriculture becoming more common, slavery would have ended peacefully, instead of 750,000 people being killed.

Ron Paul: Racist

Politico’s The Arena asked its panel on Tuesday “Do Ron Paul’s newsletter explanations hold up?” Jeffrey Stewart, Professor of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara, wrote that he believes the letters “are a symptom not an aberration.”

He sees too many similarities between “the anti-black beliefs [the newsletters] contain and the core beliefs of his candidacy.” Really, Paul’s candidacy is based on anti-black beliefs? If Paul did have it out for black people, why would he be so adamantly opposed to the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, or War in general, all of which have been devastating to black families?

Certainly if one harbored bigoted views towards black people, supporting a policy that locks them away at a staggering rate compared to non-blacks would be an effective outlet for such hatred. Another way in which to oppress black people would be to adopt certain economic policies such as minimum wage laws and central bank currency manipulation. The first contributes greatly to unemployment among younger black workers; the second disproportionately harms those in the lower income strata by destroying their money’s purchasing power.

Expanding welfare programs that discourage independence and drafting blacks at double the rate of non-blacks to fight foreign wars would also be of great help to the closet racist. The thing of it is Paul has been an outspoken critic of these policies since he first ran for congress nearly forty years ago. Perhaps this explains why he garners more support from non-white voters than any other GOP candidate, according to this recent CNN/ORC poll.

Stewart takes it further, writing that:

the antebellum defenders of slavery utilized similar arguments for individual freedom and a limited role for the federal government to claim that slavery ought to be left to the states if not the individual. Slave trading, after all, was commerce. If Paul had been president in 1861, he would not have done anything to anger the slave South.

Well, we can’t know what Ron Paul would have said at his inauguration in 1861, but we do know what the guy who was elected then said. Abraham Lincoln, who is supposed to have hated slavery so much that he launched an aggressive war to end it, declared: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” Consider also that Lincoln, in his Emancipation Proclamation, freed only those slaves behind confederate lines whom he had no authority over. The slaves residing in areas controlled by his Union army he left in bondage.

The 13^th Amendment is ultimately what ended slavery. So while Paul would have had no legal authority to end slavery, as no president had at the time, it’s patently absurd to conclude that he would have been sympathetic in the least toward the government institution of slavery. Also note that only a centralized state could institute slavery and compel others to support it via taxation and fugitive slave laws. While I’ve yet to meet Paul, nothing he’s said or written leads me to conclude he’d be in favor of this arrangement.

It continues: “Paul may not admit to it today, but if his view of the proper role of the federal government had been in place during the 1950s and 1960s, Little Rock High School would never have been desegregated.” Segregation of government schools only happened because the government made it so. If Paul’s view of government (that it should only be in place to defend individual liberty) had been in place from the outset, Little Rock High School wouldn’t have needed to be desegregated, since it never would have been segregated to begin with.

Ron Paul rejects racism as simply an ugly form of collectivism. In past debates he’s borrowed from Martin Luther King, Jr., admonishing folks to focus on the content of an individual’s character, rather than his skin color. This I suppose, could be entirely lost on someone whose profession is teaching Black Studies, since the field is predicated on dividing people into arbitrary groups, based solely on skin color.