It must be pretty darn annoying to have to deal with morons who can barely write a coherent sentence sternly lecturing you on your “errors.” Some idiot, in a review at at major book-selling site, says Tom DiLorenzo doesn’t understand the economics of the tariff because he doesn’t realize that Southern cotton planters, too, wanted tariffs — on cotton.
Um, hello? Southerners were selling cotton on a world market; a tariff doesn’t help them at all. There were tariffs on _cotton manufactures_, but that’s not the same as raw cotton.
The guy goes on to explain to Tom that a real libertarian should be fighting for individual rights rather than worrying about federalism and the states. A superficial dichotomy. As I wrote on this site, left-libertarians “imagine a strong, large-scale state defending everyone’s natural rights. And they’re actually surprised when it never works!”
Moreover, if the left can claim that Lincoln “grew” during the war, and transformed a war to save the Union into a war to abolish slavery, why can’t Southerners be said to have “grown” during the war, and have come to appreciate more deeply the value of the principles they were fighting for? Alexander Stephens, who had originally opposed secession, could see it: “If centralism is ultimately to prevail; if our entire system of free Institutions as established by our common ancestors is to be subverted, and an Empire is to be established in their stead; if that is to be the last scene of the great tragic drama now being enacted: then, be assured, that we of the South will be acquitted, not only in our own consciences, but in the judgment of mankind, of all responsibility for so terrible a catastrophe, and from all guilt of so great a crime against humanity.”
Ah yes, the centralized modern state will make us alll free. But as Prof. Donald Livingston points out, “Slavery is evil because one man owns the labor of another. But what are we to say when the state centralizes power to the point where it can not only conscript the labor of its so-called ‘citizens,’ but make them cannon fodder as well? Not even the worst pagan gods demanded such human sacrifice as was offered up in World War I….”
“After World War I,” Livingston continues, “state slavery suddenly reappeared in modern states. In only two generations, tens of millions would perish in slave camps, overshadowing the 11 million Africans brought to the Western Hemisphere in four centuries of the slave trade, about five percent of whom ended up in North America.”
Read Livingston’s article here (it’s a .pdf file, so you may want to right-click and save).
Given the horrors of which modern, centralized states have shown themselves capable, surely it’s not exactly morally obtuse to try to conceive of a way of ending slavery peacefully — as essentially everyone else in our hemisphere somehow managed to do — and in a manner that does not involve destroying the federal nature of the Union, the one major contribution the U.S. made to the world. That’s what DiLorenzo and Jeff Hummel are trying to say.
The moral benefit of the doubt must be given to those fighting to prevent the emergence of a consolidated national state, hemmed in by nothing and supreme over everything. Only the most superficial can view such an outcome solely in terms of ending slavery — after all, what else might these megastates, which left libertarians favor because they think they might promote “liberty,” want to do someday?
2:43 pm on January 14, 2004
