The sages do not consider that making no mistakes is a blessing.
They believe, rather, that the great virtue of man lies in his ability
to correct his mistakes and continually make a new man of himself.
Wang Yang-Ming
Remy's Parody on Venezuela, Socialism, etc.
The Libertarian Controversy Over Southern Secession
Part of my miscellany "formula" is to present 3 clips/segments per post. I try to limit my clips to a limit of 10 minutes or so to maintain reader interest although on an infrequent basis (say, every couple of weeks or so) I have occasionally included longer clips. I finally decided to include Tom Woods podcast links to my feeds, and this 50-minute clip is a personal favorite, for reasons I'm about to discuss. I can recall clipping Woods videos on maybe a handful of prior occasions when I stumbled across them without a subscription. I probably won't link to his content as frequently as I do Ron Paul's; it's a judgment call in the material I come across, and readers may have noticed I'll occasionally embed full Facebook content as well.Just a brief introduction to Woods. he is an adult convert to Catholicism, he is a Columbia (Harvard BA) history PhD and one-time professor (I don't know the story there, but his outside activities, including writing, public speaking appearances, and more entrepreneurial recent activities like podcasting probably led him to leave academia or provided an opportunity to do so). He's on the anarcho-capitalism edge of libertarianism (which argues limited government is like being a little bit pregnant). He's particularly attached to the Austrian school of economics and the Mises Institute. Unlike many libertarians who often refuse to vote on principle (e.g., Don Boudreaux), he was a champion of Ron Paul's POTUS runs in 2008 and 2012.
I think I first came across Woods in the mid-2000's through 2 or 3 of his books (Catholicism and the free market, its impact on Western Civilization, a politically incorrect American history). I evolved more to the libertarian side of my libertarian-conservatism during Obama's first term and was one of the first subscribers to his podcasts and his (public) Facebook feeds. There are a few things I find a little off-putting in his personality: he's constantly self-promoting (cruises, speeches, books, his history classroom videos, etc.), he's got an almost cultish affection to the Austrian school, and he's a little too full of himself and can come across as judgmental. Woods himself has a cultish following as I discovered for myself. There were a few times he published things I took exception to, e.g., unnecessary cheap shots at Romney, who ran runner-up to McCain in 2008 and got the GOP nod in 2012. There were a handful of times he pissed me off in his Facebook feed, one time in particular I remember being on the occasion of Ron Paul's birthday (post-2012), where Woods publicly thank God for principled people like Paul vs. phonies like Romney. I took exception to this cheap shot, and we engaged in a nasty exchange. I know at one point (it may have been on this occasion) I challenged him to a debate, which he ignored. and he encouraged his minions to take on this rogue Romney apologist. (You aren't going to win playing on someone else's court under their rules.) (By the way, any familiar reader to my blog knows I've been a Romney critic; I still think he blew a chance to blow away Obama in 2012, by fusing the opposition to Big Government Bush/Obama, and I've been a sharp critic of Romney's role in the roots of ObamaCare and his neo-con and anti-immigration views.) At some point during the dispute, I warned him that if he kept up his nonsense, I would unsubscribe to his feeds, and he mocked me, pointing out his gifts of disseminating knowledge for the betterment of mankind and ungrateful ignorant creeps like me, spurning the opportunity to learn his truths. So I made good on my promise, although I remained on one of his email lists. One day over the past year, he publicly chided another former unnamed listener (there was enough context for me to know he wasn't referring to me) for similar reasons, wondering why people weren't more appreciative of his self-sacrifice in helping them learn something.
Let me point out, unlike Woods, I don't have any ancillary business interests like books, subscriptions, public appearances or cruises. I've never earned a single penny, gift or discount, for a single word I've written for any blog, article, book chapter or whatever. I have only limited followers on Twitter, Facebook or my blogs, hardly enough to boost interest in future endeavors. (On Facebook, I've deliberately limited my friends to under 20 friends and relatives. I have a few dozen who have submitted friend requests, probably motivated by my political comments. You never can tell. I remember one lady was impressed when I embedded Cole Porter songs. One of my nephews said that he enjoyed my political cartoons (before my current coverage of FreedomToons).
So why do I do it? Similar to when I taught in college, which I truly loved and would probably do again given the opportunity. I found in teaching, I not only had to know the material inside out but had to structure it in a way to help other people to learn. Writing this blog forces me to pay attention to current events, to learn or augment my knowledge, reexamine history, economics, and a number of topics. I've mentioned this before; early in the Obama Presidency, I thought I had had my say and came close to shelving the blog. But probably by the end of this month, I'll post my 4000th post and I don't see a shortage of topics anytime soon, especially as Democrats look to revive a radical Statist agenda for 2020; to give another example, we've seen a sudden surge of interest in New York, Vermont, Virginia and likely other one-party states blurring the line between abortion and infanticide, legalizing abortion at any moment prior to delivery. We are talking about murdering babies able to survive outside the womb. And not a few leftists want taxpayers to fund the murder of preborn babies. In the divisive years since Roe v Wade, I did not foresee the moral depravity that would assert a "right" to kill late-term babies.
Now this video directly addresses a topic that Cato Institute or its affiliate libertarianism.org seems to run every 6 weeks or so, chiding "libertarians" (yes, they mock the sincerity of our views) who are critics of Lincoln's bloody Civil War, basically arguing we are the hypocritical apologists for the pro-slavery Confederacy.
This is so unconscionable on so many levels that I've repeatedly commented at least a handful of times and republished in my features Facebook Corner and (more recently, my fused) Social Media Digest the following points (not comprehensive):
- there was no insurrection here. Secession was not an attempt by the Southern states to conquer the North. The North invaded the South, with no provocation.The South engaged in due process in their acts of secession; this was not some military coup or mob taking over the legitimate state government. In libertarian circles, voluntary association is a fundamental principle; secession is a directly related concept.
- the idea that the sovereignty of states to ratify but not to repeal membership in the Union is fundamentally inconsistent: when did future generations become bound permanently to decisions made by a first generation? What if the Union contradicted the terms of the original agreement? Never mind the hypocrisy of the slave rationalization, because most colonies were slave-holding at the time of the Revolution; did they lack legitimacy of renouncing the British crown? And let's point out that Lincoln explicitly said he didn't have the authority to abolish slavery in his first inaugural address: what he wouldn't abide is the hit on tariff collection in the South
- abolitionist and proto-libertarian Lysander Spooner opposed the Civil War
- opposing federal intervention does not imply you support an existing government. For example, I oppose US intervention in Syria and Venezuela, which does not mean I endorse Assad or Maduro.
I'm not claiming to be the only or first person making these arguments but my views were hardly popular on the Cato Institute threads; I got few, if any, notified "likes". (For all I know, Cato Institute may have deleted my comments.) I find it unconscionable that America sacrificed a generation, unlike every other country on earth which abolished slavery peacefully. In fact, many Northern states had done the same. The North, without the South, would have repealed the Slave Fugitive Law, which would have raised the costs of maintaining slaves. Buyers might have boycotted slave-enabled commodities or paid a premium to alternative suppliers. Free labor resented wage-weakening competition from slave labor and having to pay for government costs in reclaiming slaves; the South could lose economy-crippling labor migration to the North. I could go on and on.
I'm glad to hear Woods and Brion McClanahan echo some of these points. I'm particularly impressed by McClanahan's fluency with several points that I want to read some of his other material.
