Remember LewRockwell.com in your contributions. Once again we here at LewRockwell.com bring you a guide for this months holidays.
February, leap day and lunar months. February is special at it changes its numbers. On leap years, the year we experience the untrammeled joy of a presidential race, we get ONE MORE DAY to enjoy the circus.
When a novice in "This Movement of Ours" I encountered a libertarian magazine dedicated to both libertarianism and calendar reform.
Libertarianism is an everyday topic here, but calendar reform, that is rare.
They proposed 13 months of 28 days, to wit, lunar months. They would take two to three days from the non-February months and create a month called, if memory serves, "Sol."
It might be neater if all the months had the same number of days, but would it be worth the disruption? One could argue the same of the metric system or most of the State's innovations.
Which is the point about change: our way is one contract at a time. Our Enemy the State, by fiat.
Lincoln's Birthday, Feb. 12. Regarding our 16th President there is precious little a paleo would celebrate. Let us start with the "precious little" that a paleo may celebrate of Abraham Lincoln.
He was one of the best trial lawyers to emerge on the American scene. His was a background of grinding poverty and of limited formal schooling. To go from that to the top of a learned profession is something a paleo, or anyone, can properly admire.
For us paleo's, the problem with Lincoln is his politics. The modern American state is his legacy. More so than Wilson, Roosevelt II or Lyndon Johnson, Lincoln created a State that no internal component could defy.
For the dream [nightmare?] of a consolidated, national government during the adoption campaign for in 1787 was fulfilled through Lincoln. In terms of growth Americans went from a federal government that represented 1-2% of the gross domestic product to one of 20% by 1865 [I am indebted for this analysis from Jeffrey Roger Hummel's excellent Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men].
Returning to Lincoln as lawyer there is an issue worth noting: he was a major trial lawyer in a rapidly innovating area of American life that was heavily state-sponsored and controlled. It would be comparable to being a trial lawyer involved in the airline or radio business in the 1920's and 30's.
What about ending slavery?
Two points:
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There is considerable evidence that slavery was a dying institution in the upper South. Slavery needed constant governmental intervention from a Fugitive Slave Act to conscription by local militias to keep it profitable. Prominent leaders of the Confederacy believed the institution was doomed with an independent Confederacy as fugitive slaves would undermine the institution fatally.
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If the "peculiar institution" would end through natural causes then was the cost of forcibly ending it justified? This takes us to the first point: paleo's don't embrace or eschew change per se. We just prefer it "one contract at a time" and not by State fiat.
The cost of freeing slaves came at the price of enslaving many free men, latching onto this land of liberty a State ten times its former size and establishing a federal government that no state or combination therein could readily defy.
Which takes us to a weird consolation for a paleo of Abraham Lincoln. You know there is something wrong with a philosophy that consumes its' own heroes. That is what is happening to Abraham Lincoln. He used to have his own holiday and now he is lumped in with a holiday for all Presidents. When alive he burned with political ambition, to be in the limelight of national politics.
Today he holds sway among Court historians and neo-conservatives. Isn't that a mark of how far he has fallen?
Ash Wednesday, Feb. 13. For Christians we begin forty days of Lent. For us it is a time of mortification, not to re-enact Jesus's suffering and death, but to remember. This is a real Holy Day, not a secularist shadow of the real thing. We set these days apart from others to reconnect spiritually. Let us pray.
Valentines Day, Feb. 14. A saint who commerates romantic love. A further confirmation of C.S.Lewis's notion that sin represents corruptions of pleasures, but that pleasure is Providential.
Years ago Johnnie Carson was lambasting Valentine's Day as just another opportunity for women to play "gimme." Perhaps someone who has been married five times is going to be jaded about Romance. He is living proof of Samuel Johnson's dicta of re-marriage ["the triumph of hope over experience"].
As a tail end member of the baby boom [1956] of course We knew that sex was invented by us….hey wait a moment; My parents must have….but wait their parents must have….you know, this has been going on for a long time. Madeira, my dear?
Presidents Day, Feb. 18. This year it falls on the 18th. Paleo's are happy on any day that government closes. The reason we have this holiday has little to do with celebrating American Presidents, rather it has to do with two Presidents we used to honor separately in February being consolidated into one holiday.
As noted above "…there is something wrong with a philosophy that consumes its' own heroes." Statism has triumphed due to war, as war is still the "health of the state" [thank you, Randolph Bourne]. To get the war, though, you first need the warrior President.
Of the three branches of the federal government, statism has needed and used the executive branch more than the Congress or Judiciary.
But in the effort by the statist to celebrate all Presidents with this holiday they fall to banality.
What is a paleo to do? Remember Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson [on the National Bank, not on the Tariff Crisis or Cherokee relocation] or the last good Democrat, Grover Cleveland.
Washington's Birthday, Feb. 22. "First in war, first in Peace," author of a Farewell Address that guided our country toward Republic and away from Empire. A man of such impeccable integrity that even his political enemies trusted him.
Yes, he supported the awful Alien and Sedition Act, enforced the Whiskey tax [actually resistance to that tax killed it, but that is another matter] and was a Federalist.
There is something of a fraud involved in our first George President.
Anti-Federalist agitation had stymied adoption of the 1787 Constitution overthrowing the Articles of Confederation. What broke the opposition were two items: that the first President would be George Washington and that the Congress would enact a Bill of Rights as Amendments to the Constitution.
What is the fraud?
That someday someone of less impeccable integrity would be President, but we would still be stuck with the far more centralized Constitution instead of the Confederation.
