JMF: Being critical of something [implies *] that there was a better way to have done it.

Well, no, it doesn’t. There are no guarantees that the best option you can hope for won’t still have genuine faults or defects. It may have fewer or different from all the other available options, but still have them; and in this vale of tears, usually it has plenty. But honesty and critical thought require that we be able to recognize and point out the faults that are there. You can’t do good accounting if you only look at the benefits and ignore all the costs. Hence, while I *disagree* with you that the process that led to the adoption of the U.S. Constitution was the best option available at the time, I don’t actually care about trying to get you to agree with me on that point. Say it was the best option available, for the sake of argument. Well, then so what? It is still perfectly reasonable to point out, and to acknowledge, the real faults that it had. Not to ignore them or to make up convenient fictions about “the people” approving something that they were never consulted on.

(*) I think you mean “implies” here, not “infers.” A reasoner infers things from what a statement or act implies.

JMF: If the Constitution had been imposed without input it wouldn’t have required so much debate or so many compromises. For instance the slave debate was quite heated …

Good God. “The slave debate” was “quite heated” among a handful of white male politicians arguing among themselves about what they should all be doing about (or to) black people. There was no debate allowed, heated or otherwise among the majority of the people directly affected by the issue of slavery (viz., slaves).

JMF: In this case the Constitution was a victim of input from those it was about to govern …

Well, no; I think that if all those “it was about to govern” had “input” into the process then the matter would have come out quite differently. There were more slaves getting good and governed by the U.S. Constitution than there were slaveholders.

Look, my point is not that the tiny minority of the population you’re discussing here had no input into the Constitution, or that there were no debates among them. Of course they did and of course they were. My point is, once again, that the vast majority of the population had no input into the Constitution, were not asked, had no option to vote for or against ratification, etc. You may think that a debate and a process limited to this tiny circle of political, racial and sexual elites is the best that could have be hoped for under the circumstances. Fine, argue for that if you want to believe it. But whether that is true or false, even if domination by a 5% minority faction is definitely the best that could have been hoped for under the circumstances, that doesn’t magically transform the 5% minority faction into “the people.” (“The people” does not mean “the tiny faction currently in political power.”) If you want to defend the imposition of the Constitution by a tiny minority on the unwilling majority, as the least-bad option available at the time, fine, go ahead and defend that. Sometimes tiny minorities are right, and often the actions of tiny minorities are all that can be hoped for. But you don’t get to pretend as if the tiny minority were something other than a tiny minority. If you want to defend something, you have to defend it, as it really is, not a civics-class children’s tale about We The People.

JMF (previously): On the other hand I know he was a radical abolitionist that was exceedingly naïve if he thought the South [sic] was going to tolerate legislation that threatened their [sic] social order.

Me: He believed nothing of the sort.

JMF: From the home page of LysanderSpooner.org: “Entrepreneur, scholar, radical abolitionist…”

I didn’t say that Spooner was not a radical abolitionist! I linked you to his “Plan for the Abolition of Slavery,” which is about as radical an abolitionist document as you could find. I said that he did not believe that Southern slave-holders would have tolerated legislation that threatened slavery. (That is, he did not believe the thing that you accused him of being “exceedingly naive” for allegedly believing.) As I discussed at some length, Spooner had notions of how to abolish slavery, but his conception of the best way to do so had nothing in particular to do with convincing Southern slave-holding politicians to adopt different sorts of legislation.

JMF: I would offer the US government didn’t have any other choice as long as they were faithful to the concept of State’s Rights …

Provisions like the Fugitive Slave clause and the Domestic Violence clause had nothing to do with fidelity to the concept of states’ rights. They were direct grants of federal power that forced the people in free states to subsidize the slaveholding of people in slave states, by being forced to pay for, collaborate with, or serve as, the enforcers of the slave system.

JMF: Just to be clear it appears to me you are offering that one flavor of force and violence is preferable over another?

I didn’t tell you anything about what I find “preferable.” I told you what Spooner’s position was.

Spooner certainly did believe that abolishing slavery through the use of force was justified; what he didn’t believe in was abolishing it through the use of a government war of conquest against the South. He didn’t object to the Civil War because he objected to force per se; he objected to it because he believed that if force were to be used, it ought to be used against slaveholders, not against hundreds of thousands of innocent farmers, conscripted soldiers, women and children; that it ought to be used in order to end slavery, not in order to establish open-ended political dominance; and that it ought to be directed by the people immediately affected by slavery (viz., slaves), not by a foreign power that could generally have cared less whether they lived or died, so long as The Union could be Saved.

Maybe Spooner is right about that and maybe he’s wrong. But that’s his position, not the “exceedingly naive” position you thought to attribute to him.

JMF: It doesn’t appear Spooner considered that the moment the Confederacy had evidence that the “material support” originated in the Union they would have declared war anyway

There was no “Confederacy” at the time Spooner wrote the “Plan” (1858), so of course he does not discuss what the not-yet-existent Confederacy might or might do. It would have been nice if he had updated the “Plan” after the secession and the outbreak of the Civil War to discuss in greater detail how it would apply to the changed circumstances, but he was busy with other things at the time. However, I will note that (1) he was not suggesting that governments at the North ought to be lending aid to rebellions against slavery. He was suggesting that Southern blacks and non-slaveholding whites ought to take the lead in rising up against individual slaveholders, and that sympathetic private partisans in the North might be able to lend aid at a later date (at which point the guerilla warfare might be safely escalated into “general insurrection”). (2) It might well turn out that the newly-independent Southern slavocratic states might try to attack the North in order to stop Northern partisans from supporting the uprising. Desperate autocracies do all kinds of desperate things. But if you think that the Northern government possibly ending up, many years down the road, fighting a limited defensive war in order to ward off an attempted invasion of the North is “the same destination” as the Northern government aggresively launching a total war for the reconquest and occupation of the South, then I can’t say I much trust your sense of direction. Certainly, Spooner, for his part, would have thought very differently of the Northern government’s position in the former kind of war than he thought of its position in the latter.

JMF: The majority of Johnny Rebs weren’t Southern slave holders.

(1) The majority of Southerners weren’t “Johnny Rebs.” The majority of Southerners were black slaves and white women. Many (but by no means all) of the latter feared emancipation. Most of the former did not.

(2) I agree that many non-slaveholding white men did fight for the Confederacy. And so what? That would tell against my point only if the people fighting for the Confederacy were all doing so because they “feared emancipation.” But most ordinary Confederate soldiers weren’t fighting because they gave much of a damn either way about emancipation. They were fighting, at first, because their homes were being invaded; later on, many of them were fighting because they were conscripted by the Confederate government.

Of course, the grand war aims of the Confederate government are quite a different story: those did have a lot to do with preserving race slavery and fear of emancipation. But it is hardly news that the motives of ordinary soldiers, and the motives of the commanders and political masters who order them to die, are often different.

JMF: Even though our schools teach it was about Slavery, it wasn’t.

I don’t know what school you went to. Mine (mostly schools in the South, especially in Auburn, Alabama) certainly didn’t teach anything of the sort; and most standard high school American History textbooks (mine was The American Pageant) present a poorly-organized laundry-list of about 6 or 7 different things that the war might have been about and maybe on the other hand might not have been, without much attempt to sift through any of it or to point out that different sides might have had different motivations. Any discussion at all of political motivations was pretty quickly quashed in favor of moving on to a long and gory recounting of which battles happened where and when.

In any case, I don’t know what you mean to say by claiming that the Civil War wasn’t “about Slavery.” If you mean to point out that the Federal government wasn’t fighting in order to end slavery, you’re quite right: they didn’t much care about that, at least for the first 18 months of the war, and said so repeatedly. (When they did finally start making moves towards freeing slaves, they justified them as war measures to weaken the Confederate military resistance.) If you mean to claim that the Confederate government wasn’t fighting in order to preserve slavery, that claim is very clearly contradicted by what the Confederates themselves said at the time. (You might, for example, try reading the declarations of secession, or the Confederate constitution, or Alexander Stephens’ “Cornerstone” speech; the Confederates could not have been more clear that their primary motive in the conflict was to preserve and protect the institution of race slavery and white supremacy.) Of course, many ordinary Southern whites didn’t care much about those aims and had no interest in protecting slavery; but ordinary Southern whites didn’t make the decisions about secession or about war policy. Slaveholding politicians like Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens did, and their priorities were different.)

JMF: However the question remains; Is it oppressive to force people to admit the equality of someone else they deem inferior? Does someone have the right to be a racist?

The libertarian response to this would be to point out that the question is confused. People have a right to believe anything that they want; the question is not whether or not you can force someone to admit something in the sense of changing their beliefs, but whether or not you can force someone to stop inflicting violence on other people in the name of those beliefs. So, for example, you have every right to be as racist as you want to be (the belief is wrong, but you have a right to be wrong; not all vices are crimes). But you do not have the right to enslave people of other races. And if you try it, they, and anyone who cares to help them, have a right to stop you, by force if necessary.

Which means that they have a right to use force against you. What they do not have a right to do is to raise an army, invade your whole neighborhood, firebomb your entire block, invade your innocent neighbors’ houses, tear up their gardens and kill their children, establish martial law in your streets, and take over the local homeowner’s association, which they will now run as they see fit, on a lot of issues which have nothing at all to do with your personal crime of slaveholding. Individual crimes merit a response against the individual who committed them; they do not merit an invasion and collective punishment against anyone who happened to be in the vicinity.

JMF: If we say the South should have been allowed to cede what do we say of modern controversies that are similar? Should California be able to cede if the Supreme Court overturns Prop 8 and Gays can get married again? .Should Arizona cede if the Supreme Court overturn 1070? Should the South threaten to cede because they want to implement sectarian education and the Feds say it violates Separation?

Like Spooner, I believe in an unlimited and unconditional right of secession, so my answers to your questions are “Yes,” “Yes,” and “Yes.” However, also like Spooner, I believe that the right is an individual, natural right which can be applied at any level of political association — not a collective legal right which magically stops below the state level. So I certainly think that the Federal government should not try to invade, conquer and occupy Arizona if the Arizona state government tried to secede from the U.S. over immigration policy. (**) But I also think that counties, cities, neighborhoods, and individual people in Arizona who disagree with the state government’s asinine “Papers, Please” police state policies ought to be free to secede from the state government of Arizona. Of course, the state government in Arizona might not be happy about the prospect of pro-liberty Arizonans striking out on their own, and leaving innocent Mexicans free to peacefully work, live and travel while in the free and independent counties, cities, neighborhoods, or private properties. They might even try to invade to force them not to secede from Arizona. But if so, the problem for individual rights here is not too much secession. It’s too little.

(**) Note that the issue is not whether or not I think it would be *right* for them to secede over that; it’s whether or not they ought to be *left in peace* if they decided to do so, i.e., whether the Federal government should call out its armed forces in order to invade and occupy Arizona in order to force them back into an unwilling “union” with the U.S. government.

Daniel Shapiro: I think it’s pretty obvious that the American Civil War was primarily a conflict about states rights vs. federal rights

I think it’s obvious that that’s what Lincoln’s pursuit of the war was about. (More or less the same goes for the rest of the Republican war administration.) He couldn’t have been more explicit
as to his “paramount object in this struggle.” But it’s not clear that that’s what the conflict was about for other people involved in it. If one side in a war has a particular cause for fighting, it’s not always the case that the other side has an equal but opposite cause. I think it’s pretty clear from the use of federal power by the Southern slavocracy prior to the war (esp. in the 1840s-1850s), from a number of the centralizing policies of the Confederate government (which was if anything more interventionist than the U.S.; see Hummel’s discussion of “Confederate War Socialism” in Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men), and from the explicit statements of folks like Jeff Davis against those who contemplated secession from the Confederacy, that the folks in charge were not primarily concerned with any strong theory of local rights and delegated powers, but rather something much more concrete: maintaining white supremacy, with “states rights” and secession being valuable mainly insofar as it was conducive to that end. Of course, there are also many others who fought in the war who had other reasons for their own, besides the views of the belligerent governments: black Union soldiers who explicitly were fighting mainly to free themselves and enslaved black Southerners, Missouri partisans who fought against the Union not for slavery or states rights but because the Army was burning down their farms and running them off their land (again, see Hummel’s discussion on the occupation and insurgency in the border states). Etc. etc.

Daniel Shapiro: Even by the the 1860′s, chattel slavery was becoming economically expensive. … The immorality of slavery is beyond debate. However, I believe that chattel slavery would have entirely disappeared for economic reasons well before the 20th century without a Civil War.

Well, maybe, but the studies on the economics of slavery in the 1850s and 1860s tend to paint a pretty complicated picture. It is clear that slavery was expanding economically, not declining, in the years leading up to the Civil War, especially in the Deep South. (Part of the reason that the issue of expanding slavery into U.S. territories was such a politically explosive one was that they had an extremely profitable — for them, of course, not for their victims — mode of production that they wanted to expand into other rich territories like the Plains, or California. For that matter, they wanted to seize Cuba, too.) Anyway, I think that the underlying issue of whether slavery was on the whole profitable for slave-drivers, or not profitable for slave-drivers, depends on what set of costs you look at. Just before the Civil War, it was extremely profitable on the account books — but only because a lot of the real costs of maintaining a slave system (in particular, the enforcement costs — the costs of blocking, hunting, and capturing fugitive slaves, of suppressing slave revolts, etc. — had largely been extensively socialized through state and Federal government (through the Fugitive Slave Act, the use of the U.S. Army to crush revolts, etc.). Of course it’s hard to make any kind of reasonable counterfactual prediction, but I think the data tends to show that if the slavers continued to be able to socialize the costs of terrifying, torturing, and recapturing “their” slaves, then slavery might well have been able to continue being profitable for decades. On the other hand, had they not been able to continue socializing these costs, it would have collapsed economically, not so much from competition with industrial production (you can have industrial slavery; cf. I.G. Farben), but rather from the dissolution of the slavers’ resources for keeping slaves under their boots.

One of the results of this is that it raises the question of what the likely effects of a successful secession would have been. Given the huge role that the federal government played in the enforcement of slavery throughout the 1840s-1850s, I think that the Confederates would have found that their secession actually made it increasingly difficult to sustain slavery once they no longer had the Fugitive Slave Act and the U.S. Army doing their dirty work for them at Northern taxpayers’ expense.

Roughly, because Lew founded the Mises Institute as a direct challenge to the Cato Institute (*), and to provide an institutional home for Murray Rothbard after the Kochs threw him out of Cato. The split was very nasty and there was a lot of bad blood between the parties over what happened. For the Rothbardian side of the story, see this from David Gordon. I don’t know if anyone’s printed a similar recounting from Crane’s or the Kochs’ point of view.

(*) Both in terms of their approach to libertarianism, and also in terms of the personal influence of the Kochs and Ed Crane.

MBH: Is it not an instance of fraud?

The answer is still “No.”

All together now…

o/~ Come on you all gotta listen to me: / Lay off that Scaife; leave that Koch-aine be… o/~

MBH:

The threat of force is merely “disingenuous political rhetoric” now? Not coercion?

Oh, come on. You’re equivocating on the term “threat.” There’s “threatening” in the sense of a promising to inflict harm yourself, and “threatening” in the sense of merely frightening. Merely frightening someone with the prospect that an unrelated third party will harm them (without your direction, and indeed quite against your will) may be founded or unfounded, and it may be honest or dishonest, but even if dishonest it is not coercive in the sense of violating someone’s rights. There is quite obviously a difference between threatening Gramma that if she votes for X, you are going to bash her head in with a hammer (that’s coercive), and warning Gramma that if she votes for X, then Obama is going to bash her head in with a hammer. The latter is no more coercion than any other sort of false prediction — about hurricanes, say, or financial catastrophes, or an apocalypse or whatever other dangers people make unfounded predictions about.

Of course, again, if the warning is unfounded, but you spread it anyway due to carelessness, willful ignorance, or dishonesty, then you’re violating your ethical and intellectual obligations to deal with Gramma honestly. But you are not threatening to invade her rights (or to direct anyone else to invade her rights, either). There is absolutely no plausibly libertarian theory of justice which would allow for forcible suppressing mere specious warnings, on the grounds that they are somehow equivalent to actionable threats.

MBH:

Don’t the elderly have the right to not be fooled into believing someone is out to kill them who isn’t?

A “right” in what sense? I certainly don’t think anybody has an enforceable right to be free of disingenuous political rhetoric. Everyone has an ethical obligation to be honest, so the elderly (like everyone else) have legitimate grounds for complaint if people are deceiving them. But not everything that’s unethical is morally criminal.

Hypocrisy is nothing compared to …

Well, whatever, but the Rachel Maddow segment you asked me about was a segment about the Kochs’ alleged hypocrisy. So my response was about the complaint that was being made in the segment you asked me about, not about some other complaint that you think is more important.

James Madison Fan: You act as if there was a superior alternative when there wasn’t.

I said nothing at all about “superior alternatives.” I said that it’s disingenuous to claim that the ratification process gave “the people” subjected to the U.S. Constitution a meaningful opportunity to accept or reject the obligations being imposed on them. What actually happened is that a small, privileged minority of the population unilaterally imposed open-ended, non-negotiable political obligations on a disenfranchised and oppressed majority of the population. Whether or not that strikes you as the best that could be hoped for under the circumstances is a separate question.

That said, I’d also note that (1) you seem to be talking a lot about the Revolution, but my comments weren’t about the Revolution. They were about the adoption of the Constitution, which was a separate event, carried out years later, mostly by a different group of men, and which many of the Revolutionaries were actively opposed to. Maybe you think that without the Constitution, the Revolution would have failed; but if so, that’s a strong historical claim that you’d need to argue for. (2) I don’t know what evidence you think you have for believing that American Indians or black slaves would have been worse off under the English monarchy (slavery was abolished in British colonies decades before it was abolished in independent America; the English monarchy’s attempts to curb white land-grabs west of the Appalachians was one of the white Revolutionaries complaints). My attitude towards the American Revolution is generally positive, but it’s mixed and complicated (revolutions are big, complicated things), and I think honest observers ought to acknowledge the real faults and vices of the revolutionaries — let alone the much more conservative and centralist regime that overtook them in 1789.

James Madison Fan: On the other hand I know he was a radical abolitionist that was exceedingly naïve if he thought the South was going to tolerate legislation that threatened their social order.

He believed nothing of the sort.

What he believed is that the military invasion and reconquest of the Southern states was not an justifiable way to deal with the situation. He believed that slavery should be abolished by other means. (Spooner’s attitude towards the war, as expressed in No Treason No. 2, was that “The result – and a natural one – has been that we have had governments, State and national, devoted to nearly every grade and species of crime that governments have ever practised upon their victims; and these crimes have culminated in a war that has cost a million of lives; a war carried on, upon one side, for chattel slavery, and on the other for political slavery; upon neither for liberty, justice, or truth.”)

James Madison Fan: What did he expect? Southern land owners were going to admit they were equal to Blacks and embrace them as brothers?

No, he believed that Southern whites would remain unrepentant slavers. His published Plan for the Abolition of Slavery (1858) was for black Southerners and poor white Southerners to ally with each other to abolish slavery by means of escape, slave uprisings, and guerilla warfare against white slaveholders, with moral and material support from sympathetic Northern abolitionists. I don’t know whether Spooner wrote anything on the topic before the outbreak of the Civil War, but many radical abolitionists believed (rightly, I think) that it would actually be far easier to destabilize slavery in the South after secession than before it, since enforcement of the slave system depended, in the last resort, on Federal force, in the form of the Fugitive Slave Act and the use of the U.S. Army to suppress slave uprisings. (If you’re interested in the topic, for a good overview of the radical abolitionist support for Disunionism, I’d recommend either Jeffrey Rogers Hummel’s _Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men_, or _All On Fire_, Henry Mayer’s excellent biography of William Lloyd Garrison.)

But, anyway, whether or not Spooner is correct about all this has nothing to do with whether or not people were free to “dispel” their political obligations to the U.S. government when Spooner wrote his pamphlet. Manifestly, they were not — whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing — and many of them had just recently been forced to submit to those obligations at bayonet-point, in spite of their explicit refusal of the obligations and their concerted efforts to opt out of them. I’m not insisting that you agree with Spooner’s argument; what I’m objecting to is the attempt to make the argument look silly by disregarding basic facts about the historical situation.

James Madison Fan: On the other hand the change the South feared the most was the abolition of Slavery which is a moral imperative especially in a nation the purports to be the “Land of the Free.”

Well, “the South” didn’t fear abolition. Southern slaveholders did. Enslaved Southerners (who were, remember, a numerical majority of the population in many parts of “the South”) generally welcomed the prospect. Of course you are right that Southern slaveholders were terrified of abolition, and that that was a large part of their reason for seceding and for fighting the Feds’ attempts to regain political control. You’re also right that the abolition of slavery is a moral imperative. But I don’t see how that makes the Civil War a “conundrum,” unless you think that the invasion and occupation of the South was the only way in which slavery might have been abolished. I don’t think that it’s the only way slavery might have been abolished; if there are other means by which abolition might have been accomplished just as well or better, without a war of reconquest and a military occupation of the South, then abolition doesn’t lend much moral weight to the Feds’ cause.

**MBH,**

1. On the Maddow clip: mostly, I don’t care. Koch Industries is like any other mega-conglomerate: a consummate political-capitalist player, and destined to be eviscerated by free competition and informal and mutualistic alternatives in a freed market. Of all the corporate-welfare schemes that they benefit from, I’m far more concerned with those that they lobby for (e.g. Georgia-Pacific’s use of government land monopolies to secure tax-funded access roads and privileged access to timber) than those that they lobby against. As for the latter, I’ll say briefly that when government policies impose direct mandates on companies in order to force them into providing corporate insurance for their employees, seeking a government subsidy for the corporate insurance the company is being forced to buy is not the same thing is not the same thing as tacitly approving of the policy. Whether Koch Industries should or should not sign up for the policy (I don’t care much myself; as far as I’m concerned, the main thing that they should do is go out of business, like all the other dinosaurs of state capitalism), the charge of hypocrisy is cheap political rhetoric, not a serious moral argument.

I know that they started Reason.

They did no such thing. Reason started as a shoestring-budget staple zine put out by Lannie Friedlander in 1968. In 1970 it was sold to Bob Poole, Tibor Machan and Manuel Klausner. It’s now published by a 501(c)3, the Reason Foundation. The Kochs played no significant role in funding it, and in fact went to some length to start national magazine projects of their own due to the fact that Reason was outside of their control. You may be thinking of one of these — either Inquiry, which was a publication of the Cato Institute, or Roy Childs’s Libertarian Review, which was independent, but bankrolled almost entirely by the Kochs.

They still continue to fund it?

They donate money to the Reason Foundation and the Reason Public Policy Institute. They are not particularly big funders — from the reports I’ve seen, the Koch Family Foundations have given about $2.4 million dollars in grants to the Reason Foundation over the past 24 years, i.e. just about $100K a year. For comparison, the Reason Foundation’s annual operating expenses are between $6,000,000 and $7,000,000 a year. David K. also constitutes about 4% of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees. Neither of them exercise any editorial control whatsoever, and if they pulled the plug, Reason would lose about 1% of their annual budget. This is hardly the same thing as “owning” the magazine, and nothing like the kind of control that they exercised over Inquiry or Libertarian Review. To suggest that Jesse Walker — as a writer and editor working for a magazine which is published by a 501(c)3 to which the Kochs are sometime donors — is “bought and paid for” by the Kochs is both underhanded, and a ridiculous misrepresentation of the facts.

You’re not also bought and paid for by the Kochs are you?

I do not currently have, and never have had, any academic or financial relationship with the Koch foundations, or with any of the Kochtopus institutions. (*) Not that it would be any of your goddamned business if I had. If I had benefited at some point from a Kochtopus institution, that would not make it any more difficult for you to evaluate my arguments on their own merits. Or make the circumstantial form of argumentum ad hominem any less fallacious as a response.

(*) E.g. Cato, IHS, etc. I have been paid for some articles I wrote for the Freeman, and for all I know, it is very likely the case that the Kochs gave some money to FEE at some point — most of the libertarian business philanthropists gave money to FEE at some point or another. But FEE long predated the Koch brothers’ funding, and they never exercised significant influence over FEE in the way that they did over Cato or the IHS or Libertarian Review.

... Jeff, Well, I'm pretty sure that the reasons *don't* have much to do with the representational features of the game, such as they are. If chess were