Saturday, September 07, 2013

Yet another reason to oppose Ron Paul.

Think what you will about conservative politics, libertarian politics, and liberty, Ron Paul has too many wrong ideas about history.

Here is yet another reason I cannot take the man seriously: He completely sidesteps the academic consensus on the Civil War and is apparently ignorant of Lincoln's failed attempts to push for compensated emancipation.

And shouldn't defenders of Liberty(TM) be ardently opposed to slavery? I think freedom for millions of slaves is one of the few things a defender of Liberty(TM) should be willing to go to war for. After all, Liberty(TM)!

Friday, September 06, 2013

Desegregation

Contra the states rights/libertarian crowd, federal enforcement of desegregation at the point of a gun (eg in Alabama) is perhaps one of the best possible modern uses of government force. It is also a reasonable justification for the need for federal supremacy rather than letting the states do whatever they want. I am not implying that libertarians and others who are interested in localizing control of government are racists, but I will say that institutionalized racism is the inevitable result of their policies and that this is a mark against them that cannot be erased, especially when they campaign on "liberty".

While there are economic arguments that racism is inefficient and will be punished by the free market (and that, for instance, slavery would have died off on its own), why wait for the market to cull it out when we have the feds to guarantee it? Wait, guaranteeing individuals rights by using federal power is a statist trick, the libertarians will instead ensure your liberty by guaranteeing that states will have rights, not individuals. Especially when, in living memory, that sort of policy meant that for approximately 100 years after being constitutionally given the right to vote, certain races were not really able to vote because of state policies. And especially when people prominent in the libertarian movement have expressed reservations or even outright opposition to laws which strongly guarantee individual liberties (eg the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act) because they infringe on a state's right or a corporation's right.

In short, fuck everything about this guy and what he advocates for.

Even the Communists, who murdered millions, had a legitimate point when they pointed at America and said, "А у вас негров линчуют."