Writes Wes Baker:

I enjoyed the rather silly discussion on secession on Huffpo. I say silly because it was headed by an Aussie (sic) surrounded by typical establishment types (and a wannabe!) plus Lew and the good ol’ boy from NC!

I was teethed on the notion of secession. If there’s one issue that my family (for many generations) know, it’s this subject. I know the Webster debates, the Calhoun papers, the Jeffersonian quips, the Compact vs. Popular accession arguments, blah, blah, blah. I was reading Justice Story while other kids my age read the Hardy Boys! (I should have read the Hardy Boys for all the good it did me!)

Here’s the one argument, alluded to by the gentleman from NC — which you know only too well — that foils the pointy head law professors from Chicago, the “democracy,” wannabe economic instructors from Georgia, and the sycophantic, soft professorial types. If secession (from Great Britain) was the founding and underlying dynamic for the Articles and then the coup in 1787, then what legitimacy is there in the present system? All arguments fail against that simple, well-known, almost truistic statement/question. It’s the point that has to be hammered home again and again.

(We’re not even 250 years into this so-called ‘experiment.’ A child within the womb compared to other countries. And, yet, the establishment pontificates on a collective myth that makes Romulus and Remus look cartoonish.)

With that question, all of the foggy ‘state of nature’ rhapsodizing is exploded. All of the tick-box legal arguments of the “documents allow this/don’t allow that” are wiped away. The economic “viability” questions are as transparently meaningless as the Colony of Virginia’s concerns were for its share of the Crown’s debt.

Either the men who seceded from Britain were traitors, and should be denounced as kooks, or the philosophical principle of the right of association (and disassociation) is fundamental to any discussion about “government” in this “country.” Any institution founded on silly, kookish ideas like secession should be immediately disbanded.

P.S. Did you know that the most magisterial moment in history, even more awesome than the scene in a stable in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago, were the State ratification conventions in the late 1780’s? It was a cosmic act of infinite perpetuity.

The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.