Malicious Liars

I can’t improve upon Stephan’s rebuttal of the malicious lies and smears made by one Steve Horwitz on Tom Woods’s book, mentioned below. However, I will point out that the “review” of the book that Horwitz refers to as “convincing’ is 1)anonymous and therefore cowardly; and 2) contains not one single sentence — not one — about what is actually in the book. (Horwitz also admits, by the way, that he hasn’t read the book, yet he still has the chutzpah to posture as a “scholar.”)

The so-called “review” is not a review at all, but a hateful smear of various people Tom has lectured before who are smeared simply because they are southerners who have an interest in their own history and the history of their country. Add “bigots” to “malicious liars” as a descrpition of Horwitz and his zany pals whose own scholarship is, shall we say, virtually unknown to the world. (Horwitz was a graduate student at George mason twenty years ago when I was on the faculty there; all I remember about him is that he could never stop talking).

Horwitz accuses Tom of “romanticizing” the Confederacy. This is b.s., which seems to be Horwitz’s specialty. The word “Confederate” appears exactly once in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Ameican History, on page 62. But of course, Horwitz wouldn’t know this since he hasn’t read the book. Here’s what it says: “Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, argued that the legal basis for secession could be found in the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. That amendment had said that any power not delegated to the federal government by the states, and not prohibited to the states by the Constitution, remained a right of the states or the people. The Constitution is silent on the question of secession. And the states never delegated to the federal governemnt any power to suppress secession. Therefore, secession remained a reserved right of the states.” You cannot understand the history of the war if you do not understand this, but ignorance is bliss to the Horwitz crowd.

After reading a few of these malicious smears by Horwitz and other politically-correct “libertarians,” it is clear that they are ignorant of such history and don’t even care to learn about it. They pose as “scholars,” yet their primary concern is obviously not scholarship in pursuit of the truth, but to appear “acceptable” to their left-wing colleagues in academe or to the inside the Washington, D.C. beltway establishment. They are less-than-serious, recreational libertarians at best, and fakes and frauds at worst.

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