Tyler Cowen apparently thinks so, judging from one of his “marginal revolution” blogs that a friend recently sent to me. In the blog Cowen insinuates that critics of Lincoln and proponents of a right of secession necessarily favor everything the Confederate government did, and that Southern slaveowners did in the nineteenth century. I know, I know, it sounds like nonsense on stilts, but such are the ways of New York Times columnists these days. It makes as much sense as saying FDR’s critics are necessarily defenders of Hitler.
I also supported the right of the people of Quebec to secede from the Canadian central state when they voted on it several years ago, but of course that doesn’t mean that I also supported the supersized welfare state that the people of Quebec apparently wanted to establish. And I also support the Second Vermont Republic, which seeks to form an independent nation, although most of the leaders of that movement are left/liberals.
War is the health of the state, as Randolph Bourne famously said. So it is no surprise that, during the War to Prevent Southern Independence the Confederate government became highly centralized, as have ALL governments anywhere in the world, at any time, during wartime. It is intellectually dishonest of Cowen, and of his friend John Majewski who he cites, to argue that Southerners like Thomas Jefferson and his political heirs were simply lying when they spoke favorably of decentralized government, and then adopted a highly centralized one the first chance they got. When they were faced with the largest army ever assembled in the history of the planet one mile outside of Richmond, hellbent on destroying them and killing them by the hundreds of thousands, they did what all governments have always done in such a situation. It is absurd and plain stupid to believe that they would have done the same had they not been under invasion. Yet that is what Cowen and Majewski are saying.
What kind of “libertarian” supports the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of citizens by the central state in the name of “the glorious union”? Answer: One who hasn’t a clue about what he is talking about.
Being models of logical consistency, I anxiously await the writings by Cowen and Majewski that condemn those evil, slave-owning Northern secessionsts from New England and New York who participated in the American colonists’ secession from the British Empire, usually referred to as the American Revolution.
11:55 am on December 15, 2009
