It's always fun to watch Sandefur go after the Lew Rockwell crowd. In a post at Positive Liberty, he positively eviscerates Thomas Woods, Thomas DiLorenzo and Stephen Kinsella on several subjects. In particular, he makes mincemeat out of Thomas Woods, the neo-confederate pseudo-historian, and his claim that the Constitution was essentially a treaty between the states.
Update: And don't forget to read the follow up post, where he smacks Kinsella around a bit more. This is getting brutal. It's time for the ref to stop in and declare this a TKO.
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Are Positive Liberty and Lew Rockwell people at war or something? You're all supposed to be liberty-minded; why can't you get along? I understand disagreement, but I don't understand that kind of emnity.
I don't think the Lew Rockwell crowd is liberty minded at all, at least not the writers that I'm familiar with. I don't believe you can be pro-slavery and still legitimately consider yourself a libertarian. You can't find two ideas more opposed to one another. Thomas Woods is a founding member of the League of the South, a group that fondly reminisces about the good old days of slavery and still urges secession. They've actually put out material arguing that slavery was good for the slaves and that the pre-Civil War south was a place of racial harmony. I have a difficult time imagining anything less liberty minded than that.
Okay, but there are a LOT of people who write for Lew Rockwell, right? You cannot really impugn all of them for the views of one.
Well, I'm sure there are probably some more reasonable folks that write for that page, but every one I have ever read in any detail or encountered fits my description above. Enough so that I don't bother to read it anymore. It doesn't take too many "the South's gonna do it again" advocates to spoil the punch, in my view.
Ed said:
At our Labor Day festival in my little Texas town this past year, I noticed that every Southern parade has to have some kind of "Sons or Daughters of the Confederate Veterans Association" kind of entry, with people wearing Civil War uniforms. It made me wonder what they do in the North. I don't think there are any "Sons of the Union Warriors" floats or anything ... I guess it's only the losing side that feels the need to play dress up and revel in the forgotton "glory" of their noble but doomed fight.
The winning side's soldiers are are just "veterans" I suppose.
Anyway, sorry for the digression, the comment just sparked a memory.
There is indeed an association of the descendants of Union veterans, and yes, they do dress up and march in parades. (If you register to march and you bring your horse, the horse has to have its own separate registration. Also, "wheeled conveyances being pulled by draft animals shall be required to have affixed a diaper for the draft animals pulling them." Not historically correct, but there's something to be said for neatness.)
Every Lew Rockwell writer you've read or encountered is pro-slavery? Eh? You've got to be joking...or else maybe you've read a total of one writer, which can't be the case since you've commenting on three of them here.
The Mises Institute, named for one of libertarianism's greatest champions, has been all but taken over by a particular ideological faction, one that many will not even term libertarian. In particular, I have to say I have a very hard time understanding how individual liberty is advanced by empowering the states to maintain a system of slavery. It's just never made sense to me: If more federal authority (and less state authority) means more individual liberty, then so be it. The Mises crowd worships at the altar of states' rights, however, almost regardless of the consequences.
Gretchen wrote:
No, I didn't mean they're all pro-slavery. I meant that everyone I've read falls into that category that Jason referred to in his comment above. Every one that I've read, and it's many more than three, is in the group that thinks that the 14th amendment was the worst thing that ever happened to the country, an argument I think is profoundly silly.