I have to comment on Steve Horwitz’s uninformed comment about states’ rights in his explanation of why he, as a supposed “libertarian,” does not support the most libertarian presidential candidate since Grover Cleveland — Ron Paul.

Thomas Jefferson was the real father of the states’ rights doctrine, especially with his “Kentucky Resolve of 1798.” Horwitz obviously knows nothing about this. Jefferson was not so stupid, uneducated, and naive, as to believe that “states’ rights” meant that “states have rights,” as Horwitz says. The fundamental idea was that the federal government could never be trusted to enforce the Constituton. The citizens of the free and independent states, who created the federal government to act as their agent (in mostly military and foreign affairs)would have to have a say, and the only way they could do so is through political organizations at the state and local level. That’s how the Jeffersonians believed the Constitution could protect individual rights. The citizens of all states, north and south, resorted to Jeffersonian nullification and threats of secession whenever they thought the federal government overstepped its constitutional bounds. Ohio was especially forcefull in using Jefferson’s states’ rights philosophy in opposing the existence of the Bank of the United States within its borders.

It sickens me that people like Horwitz LIBEL Ron Paul with SLANDEROUS remarks like “states rights is a ’signal’ to neo-Confederates.” A signal to do what? Bring back slavery? Lynchings? And just who are these “neo-Confederates” who the “cosmopolitan” Horwitz (as he describes himself) doesn’t want to associate with? Furthermore, how does he know that when Ron Paul uses states’ rights language he is not merely associating himself with such heroic libertarians as Lord Acton and Jefferson himself — as opposed to diabolically sending “signals” to the KKK?

As Lew says, thank goodness there are only a few crackpot “cosmopolitan libertarians” like this.