The Bionic Mosquito has once more earned our gratitude with an incisive post. He responds to Jason Kuznicki of the Cato Institute, who condemned libertarians who admire the Confederacy: How can a libertarian support a government that defended slavery? The Mosquito asks a pertinent question: who are these libertarians? In fact, Kuznicki’s presumed targets do not admire the Confederacy. They have instead defended the right of secession and opposed Lincoln’s efforts to subdue the seceding states through war. In representing his opponents as admirers of the Confederacy, Kuznicki is attacking a straw man, or, in the British phrase, an “Aunt Sally.”
The Mosquito goes further. He wonders whether it is right, as Kuznicki says, that the Union was on libertarian grounds better than the Confederacy. The Mosquito responds: “Comparing evils: Hitler v. Stalin, Yankees v. Red Sox, Barcelona v. Real Madrid, Jason Voorhees v. Freddie Krueger. How does one decide? I will suggest that the Confederacy did nothing more than attempt to perpetuate an already existing evil; slavery existed in the South both before and after Jason’s dreaded Confederate Constitution. No new evil was introduced. Lincoln introduced many new evils, not the least of which was the war that killed more than 700,000 and wounded perhaps a like amount.”
1:10 pm on July 13, 2015
