There’s going to be a lot of candidates and a lot parties on the ballot—Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Greens, etc.
Someday, when I enter the booth in my local polling station to pull that lever of democracy, I hope to see the words Peace Party next to a candidate’s name.
That’s the label Daniel Webster campaigned under in 1814.
His country was in a war he thought was senseless. His neighbors felt unheard in Washington DC, and his home was becoming impoverished under the heavy costs of war.
So when he ran for re-election to the U.S. House, he wanted everyone to know where he stood, fixed and immovable: Peace Party!
You can soak up a lot of wisdom studying Daniel Webster’s forty year career in U.S. politics.
This man of New England served as a congressman, a U.S. senator, and as Secretary of State under three presidents.
He believed in the United States Constitution as he understood it, and when he would argue in its defense on the Senate floor, audience members in the gallery would weep at the beauty of his words.
Odds are you’ve heard me quote Webster before, when he advised just after that 1814 election that, “It will be the solemn duty of the state governments to protect their own authority over their own militia, and to interpose between their citizens and arbitrary power [by the federal government].”
That’s the logic behind our cornerstone piece of legislation, Defend the Guard.
After twenty years of the Global War on Terror, where multiple presidents have deployed our soldiers into more than half a dozen unconstitutional wars, it’s time for state governments to defend the integrity of their National Guard.
“It must be admitted to be the clear intent of the Constitution, that no foreign war should exist without the assent of Congress. This was meant as a restraint on the executive power,” Webster articulated in 1847.
He knew that no president of any party had a right “to go out of our limits, and declare war for a foreign occupation of what does not belong to us.”
When such action is committed by the executive, it’s done out of malice, ego, and the aggrandizement of personal power, because “no man is ignorant that the Constitution of the United States confers on Congress the power of making war.”
And the day that a president does foment war for his own agenda, involves his country in a permanent foreign occupation of lands not our own, and Congress proves unable or unwilling to stop this illegal war making, “then the whole balance of the Constitution is overthrown, and all just restraint on the executive power, in a matter of the highest concern to the peace and happiness of the country, entirely destroyed.”
David Hume referred to “the three fundamental laws of nature, that of the stability of possession, of its transference by consent, and of the performance of promises,” noting,
It is on the strict observance of those three laws, that the peace and security of human society entirely depend; nor is there any possibility of establishing a good correspondence among men, where these are neglected. Society is absolutely necessary for the well-being of men; and these are as necessary to the support of society.
Libertarians make a self-defeating mistake in assuming that their fundamental principles differ radically from most other people’s principles. Think how much easier it would be to bring others to the libertarian position if we realized that they already agree with us in substantial ways.
What am I talking about? It’s quite simple. Libertarians believe that the initiation of force is wrong. So do the overwhelming majority of nonlibertarians. They, too, think it is wrong to commit offenses against person and property. I don’t believe they abstain merely because they fear the personal consequences (retaliation, prosecution, fines, jail, lack of economic growth). They abstain because they sense deep down that it is wrong, unjust, improper. In other words, even if they never articulate it, they believe that other persons are ends in themselves and not merely means to other people’s ends. They believe in the dignity of persons. As a result, they perceive and respect the moral space around others. (That doesn’t mean they are consistent, but when they are not, at least they feel compelled to rationalize.)
That’s the starting point of the libertarian philosophy, at least as I see it. I am not a calculating consequentialist, or utilitarian, but neither am I a rule-worshiping deontologist. Rather, I am most comfortable with the Greek approach to morality, eudaimonism, which, as Roderick Long writes, “means that virtues like prudence and benevolence play a role in determining the content of justice, but also — via a process of mutual adjustment — that justice plays a role in determining the content of virtues like prudence and benevolence.” In this view, justice, or respect for rights, like the other virtues, is a constitutive, or internal, means (rather than an instrumental means) to the ultimate end of all action, flourishing, or the good life.
Libertarians differ from others in that they apply the same moral standard to all people’s conduct. Others have a double standard, the live-and-let-live standard for “private” individuals and another, conflicting one for government personnel. All we have to do is get people to see this and all will be well.
“Liberals” keep folks alive, “Conservatives” keep lazy moochers — including more dangerous Wiindigo, Kunlangeta, psychopaths and permanent leaders — from weakening the group by depleting its resources.
If liberals are all heart and no brain and conservatives are all brain and no heart, how would you describe libertarians?
How about, “Clearly libertarians are the perfect balance between the two.”
Here’s why that’s a pretty accurate assessment – – –
Long before history was enabled by writing, like us, our pre-historic small-group ancestors lived primarily by their brains, not their brawn.
Unlike other animals, they — like us — were born pretty much, as Rousseau and others put it, tabula rasa. That is, as “blank slates” with relatively few built-in instincts, drives, and other in-born behaviors.
For example, while hoofed animals can walk within a few minutes of birth and run soon after, it takes us approximately three months to learn to merely crawl.
The advantage to this lack of hard-wired behavior is that it gives us humans an unprecedented flexibility, allowing us to live everywhere from the icy Arctic to the steaming jungles of Ecuador to the burning sands of the Kalihari. And, in the space station, even in “outer” space. Even, perhaps, on Mars, etc.
However, because of our innate “blank slates,” like us, nearly all our ancestors’ key knowledge, skills and behaviors had to be acquired by experience, or, preferably, by learning from someone else, thus avoiding the many dangers of learning by experience.
The fact that we don’t genetically inherit most of our key knowledge, skills, information, and behaviors means that each one of us becomes a depository of different, often unique, information, skills, knowledge — and particularly, experience. And these exist only in our individual brains. This dispersion of unique knowledge and experience means the essential human data-base — and operating system — is spread out among all the individuals around us.
But our ancestors had a problem we don’t have: They were indeed pre-historic — that is, they existed before writing was available to write his-story down in black and white. So, like the book-people in Fahrenheit 451, our ancestors were each-others’ only reference-library and internet.
Madrigal knows which herbs help heal wounds — and how to find and use them. Gaud can always find that hidden water-hole during the semi-annual desert crossing. The loss of either could be catastrophic to everyone. Ditto the loss of other group members and their special knowledge and information.
Mother Nature wasn’t oblivious to this problem and so gave us an appropriate and nearly unique set of behaviors which prod us to keep each other alive. By convention, folks call these behaviors “altruism.”
It means that libertarians should cease putting all their judicial eggs in the basket of hoping to get good guys, like Richard Epstein or Alex Kozinski, on the Supreme Court. Far more important is getting rid of federal judicial tyranny altogether, and to decentralize our polity radically—to return to the forgotten Tenth Amendment.”
Like most of us who write for LewRockwell.com, I’m opposed to the Supreme Court’s pro-abortion Roe v.Wade decision. If the leak proves to be accurate and the decision is reversed, I’d be glad. As the great Dr. Ron Paul says, “All who support limited, constitutional government should support overturning Roe. The Constitution does not give any branch of the federal government authority to decide what does, and does not, constitute murder. Therefore, federal courts — including the Supreme Court — have no jurisdiction to decide what the penalty should be for performing an abortion.
Overturning Roe would not create a nationwide abortion ban. Instead, it would return to the individual states responsibility for deciding what, if any, restrictions to place on abortion.
If supporters of abortion ‘followed the science,’ they would have to admit that abortion is the taking of human life. A fetus with a heartbeat is developing, but is also still a human with a right to life.
The Biden Justice Department is supporting efforts to overturn the Texas heartbeat law in federal court. President Biden is also supporting the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of federal funds for abortions. If Biden and Congress are going to use tax dollars to support abortions, then they should allow anti-abortion taxpayers to withhold the percentage of their taxes that would be used to support abortion. The same should go for those with moral objections to America’s militaristic foreign policy that forces US taxpayers to subsidize the killing of innocent men, women, and even children. . . To ensure pro-life Americans are not forced to subsidize abortions — either directly or indirectly, it could be forbidden for organizations that promote or perform abortions to receive any federal funds. Denying federal funds to international organizations that promote or perform abortions might help reduce resentment of the US in other countries.
It is no coincidence that Roe v. Wade came at a time when respect for natural rights of life, liberty, and property was on the decline. Roe contributed to the decline in respect for rights and the rise in public and private immorality. These changes have led to violent crimes, people believing they have a moral claim — that must be enforced by the government — to the property of their neighbors, and acceptance of torture and ‘preemptive’ war. The way to reverse these developments is to restore respect for the inalienable right to life, liberty, and property of all human beings, both born and unborn. The cause of life is inseparable from the cause of liberty.”
Some pro-abortionists, especially so-called “left libertarians,” criticize us in this way. “You claim to be Rothbardians, but Murray Rothbard supported abortion. You are going against Rothbard!” As usual, these phonies have it all wrong. Murray supported reversal of Roe v. Wade. As you would expect, he gives a brilliant argument for reversal.
Rothbard says something few other people would think of. Even if you are “pro-choice,” you should still favor overturning Roe v. Wade. “But even apart from the funding issue, there are other arguments for a rapprochement with pro-lifers. There is a prudential consideration: a ban on something as murder is not going to be enforceable if only a minority considers it as murder. A national prohibition is simply not going to work, in addition to being politically impossible to get through in the first place. Pro-choice paleo-libertarians can tell the pro-lifers: ‘Look, a national prohibition is hopeless. Stop trying to pass a human life amendment to the Constitution. Instead, for this and many other reasons, we should radically decentralize political and judicial decisions in this country; we must end the despotism of the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary, and return political decisions to state and local levels.’ Pro-choice paleos should therefore hope that Roe v. Wade is someday overthrown, and abortion questions go back to the state and local levels—the more decentralized the better. Let Oklahoma and Missouri restrict or outlaw abortions, while California and New York retain abortion rights. Hopefully, some day we will have localities within each state making such decisions. Conflict will then be largely defused. Those who want to have, or to practice, abortions can move or travel to California (or Marin County) or New York (or the West Side of Manhattan.)” https://www.rothbard.it/articles/religious-right.pdf
Many “pro-choice” people oppose reversal because if abortion is left to the state or local community to regulate, then a poor woman who lives in an area where abortion isn’t allowed would have to travel to another area. She might not have the funds to do so, For that reason, they say, leaving abortion up for popular decision is an undue “hardship” on her. Rothbard skewers this so-called “argument:” “The standard rebuttal of the pro-abortionists that ‘poor women’ who haven’t got the money to travel would be deprived of abortions of course reverts back to a general egalitarian redistributionist argument. Aren’t the poor ‘deprived’ of vacation travel now? Again, it demonstrates the hidden agenda of the proabortionists in favor of socialized medicine and collectivism generally”
Murray also opposes forcing taxpayers to subsidize pro-abortionist physicians and counselors. “An unfortunate act of President-elect Clinton was to reverse the Bush policy of not funding physicians who counsel abortions. Leftists cleverly distorted this action as an ‘invasion of the free speech of physicians.’ But no ‘freedom of speech’ was involved. People should be free to speak, but this does not mean they must be shielded from the consequences of such speech. No person, and hence no physician, has a ‘right’ to receive taxpayer funding. Everyone may have the right to say whatever they like, but not the right to say whatever they like and still be funded by the taxpayers. And just as taxpayers should not be forced to fund abortions, neither should they be forced to fund people who counsel abortions.”
As always with Murray, he sees things in their broader context. It isn’t enough to reverse Roe v. Wade, Our target should be the whole system of federal judicial tyranny. “A commitment to radical decentralization means that pro-choicers should give up the Freedom of Choice Act, which would impose abortion rights by the federal government upon the entire country. It means that libertarians should cease putting all their judicial eggs in the basket of hoping to get good guys, like Richard Epstein or Alex Kozinski, on the Supreme Court. Far more important is getting rid of federal judicial tyranny altogether, and to decentralize our polity radically—to return to the forgotten Tenth Amendment.”
The so-called “left libertarians” don’t like Murray’s answer. They aren’t Rothbardians in any sense. We are the true Rothbardians, and we agree with Murray on this vital issue.
As he closed his essay Hayek confessed that since the word liberal had been corrupted, thanks to the French Revolution and other forces, by “overrationalis[m], nationalis[m]” and socialis[m],” it had ceased to a good label for his political outlook, which he shared with Tocqueville and Acton: “What I should want is a word which describes the party of life, the party that favors free growth and spontaneous evolution. But I have racked my brain unsuccessfully to find a descriptive term which commends itself.”
At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has sometimes been disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition. [Emphasis added.]
Who among true liberal advocates of individual liberty and free social evolution — aka libertarians — would deny the truth of that observation?
Hayek had European conservatism in mind when he wrote his essay, and for years, American conservatives, who still had affection for true liberalism, hastened to point this out. As Hayek wrote:
Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism. There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called “liberalism” was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense.
Later in his essay, he elaborated that “in the United States it is still possible to defend individual liberty by defending long-established institutions. To the liberal they are valuable not mainly because they are long established or because they are American but because they correspond to the ideals which he cherishes.”
But he noted that “This already existing confusion [over labels] was made worse by the recent attempt to transplant to America the European type of conservatism, which, being alien to the American tradition, has acquired a somewhat odd character.” The confusion was compounded, Hayek wrote, when socialists began to call themselves liberals.
Many still suffer from this confusion today. But change has been afoot because the illiberals of the left and right increasingly want no part of true liberalism or the label — and in a way, that’s good. Those on the left who call themselves progressives or socialists don’t like the label liberal (or neo-liberal) because they associate it with the current permanent bipartisan prowar regime beholden to special corporate interests (so we liberals still have work to do), and virtually all conservatives eschew the label because they don’t want to be mistaken for libertarians. That’s also good.
So Hayek’s essay has new relevance for America. Would Hayek have been surprised? He would have distinguished national conservatism from neoconservatism because of the latter’s cosmopolitanism. But how could he embrace as bonafide allies people who view imperialist war as a way to create “national greatness” and social solidarity, as the neocons do? Hayek would have agreed with Abraham Bishop who said in 1800 that “a nation which makes greatness its polestar can never be free; beneath national greatness sink individual greatness, honor, wealth and freedom.”
Let’s look at Hayek’s problem with conservatism. For him, the “decisive objection” is that “by its nature,” conservatism can do no more than slow down the change that progressives have initiated. That’s not good enough: “What the liberal must ask, first of all, is not how fast or how far we should move, but where we should move.” He acknowledged that although the liberal’s differences with the “collectivist radical” are greater than his differences with the conservative, the latter “generally holds merely a mild and moderate version of the prejudices of his time.” Thus “the liberal today must more positively oppose some of the basic conceptions which most conservatives share with the socialists.”
Freedom is not merely a vague historical idea, or an excuse to celebrate with firecrackers once a year; it’s a lifetime pursuit and should be taken on as such. The pilot in question has made an initial stab at it. Hopefully he, along with you, the reader, will make it a central facet of his life’s work.
Libertarians and others who seek to be left alone to run their own lives habitually ask themselves the above question regarding their government.
So, what’s the answer? Are they out to get you? Well, unfortunately, the answer isn’t a simple “yes” or “no.” In fact, it’s “yes” and “no.”
The secret to understanding a government’s intentions is that there’s no unified overall objective, sentiment, or approach to dealing with the private sector. Quite the opposite. With any government, it couldn’t be more fragmented or dysfunctional.
At the very lowest level of any government is the civil service, which is, in any country, a catch-all for all those people who are so lacking in ability and imagination that they’d be unlikely to hold down a job in the private sector. Moreover, their level of motivation is likely to be so low that their dysfunction tends to coincide with extreme inefficiency.
To test this out, one only has to visit the local Department of Motor Vehicles, or a similar agency that does little except charge fees and waste time in order to provide you with a permit, which, were it not required, you could happily do without.
Note that Alito uses the term ordered liberty. That’s a concept in the case law, apparently first enunciated in 1937, that “sets limits and defines the boundary between competing interests.” Why must the term liberty be so qualified? Because, he writes, “attempts to justify abortion [and other things –SR] through appeals to a broader right to autonomy and to define one’s ‘concept of existence’ prove too much. Those criteria, at a high level of generality, could license fundamental rights to illicit drug use, prostitution, and the like. None of these rights has any claim to being deeply rooted in history.”
Alito hastens to add that other court-protected rights that are not deeply rooted in history — such as the rights to contraception, interracial marriage, and same-sex marriage — are not jeopardized by his opinion because abortion is unique. How confident can others be about that?
In his recently leaked first draft of an opinion that would reverse the abortion-rights cases Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito gives Americans a choice between judges who read their personal preferences into the Constitution and judges who recognize only rights that they find “rooted in [our] history and tradition” and deem “essential to our Nation’s ‘scheme of ordered Liberty.’”
Is that it? Neither choice seems an adequate safeguard for individual freedom.
Whether one likes the result or not, Alito’s draft in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization raises important issues apart from abortion. Indeed, he unintendedly draws attention to whether the Constitution can be relied on to protect liberty. Unsurprisingly, Alito is not concerned with rights as a philosophical matter. That’s not his job. Rather, he’s concerned only with constitutionalrights — liberties that satisfy criteria making them worthy of protection by the government. By that standard, an otherwise perfectly defensible right might not qualify. That would be left to the legislative process. That’s the constitutional game. The framers understood this, though some libertarians do not.
The Constitution may seem to clearly endorse a general notion of liberty in the 14th Amendment’s due process clause, but does it really? Alito, like other conservatives, thinks not:
Historical inquiries … are essential whenever we are asked to recognize a new component of the “liberty” protected by the Due Process Clause because the term “liberty” alone provides little guidance. “Liberty” is a capacious term. As Lincoln once said: “We all declare for Liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing” In a well-known essay, Isaiah Berlin reported that “[h]istorians of ideas” had catalogued more than 200 different senses in which the terms had been used.
In interpreting what is meant by the Fourteenth Amendment’s reference to “liberty,” we must guard against the natural human tendency to confuse what that Amendment protects with our own ardent views about the liberty that Americans should enjoy. That is why the Court has long been “reluctant” to recognize rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution.
So, Alito writes elsewhere in his opinion, “[G]uided by the history and tradition that map the essential components of our Nation’s concept of ordered liberty, we must ask what the Fourteenth Amendment means by the term ‘liberty’ when the issue involves putative rights not named in the Constitution” — such as a woman’s putative right terminate a pregnancy.
Note that Alito uses the term ordered liberty. That’s a concept in the case law, apparently first enunciated in 1937, that “sets limits and defines the boundary between competing interests.” Why must the term liberty be so qualified? Because, he writes, “attempts to justify abortion [and other things –SR] through appeals to a broader right to autonomy and to define one’s ‘concept of existence’ prove too much. Those criteria, at a high level of generality, could license fundamental rights to illicit drug use, prostitution, and the like. None of these rights has any claim to being deeply rooted in history.”
If that counts as “proving too much,” libertarians would say let’s do it.
Alito hastens to add that other court-protected rights that are not deeply rooted in history — such as the rights to contraception, interracial marriage, and same-sex marriage — are not jeopardized by his opinion because abortion is unique. How confident can others be about that?
In his interview with Dave Smith, Colonel MacGregor yearns for “the kind of country that we were a hundred years ago, which in most cases, was interested in intervening to end conflicts, not with military power, but to offer its services as an objective partner, as someone who could bring two sides together and avoid a larger more destructive conflict“ Does this sound like isolationism and lack of compassion for our fellow man?
Libertarians, liberty-wing Republicans, and other opponents of nondefensive wars are popularly misconceived as having an “every man for himself” approach to both economics and foreign policy. Of course, this is patently false in both cases, but this piece will focus on clarifying the latter.
Local Libertarian activist Roy Minet, who has also written about the former, touched on the popular myth of isolationism in his 2014 LNParticle: “Apparently, they call anyone who doesn’t support their various military interventions around the globe an isolationist.” I made this same point in my 2017 piece about how the isolationist label helped kill Ron Paul’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. This conflation of noninterventionism with “isolationism” continues to squelch and distort the message of antiwar voices … which is particularly relevant given the current events in Ukraine.
The Libertarian National Committee recently sent out a mailer titled “No War with Russia.” It warns of the danger of entangling alliances and lays out a brief history of Russia and the US’s precarious relationship and the role the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has played in it. The prescription is noninterventionism because “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
A recent article on mises.org further explains how the state, along with its media allies, exhibits a pattern of concocting crises to perpetuate the power of this hammer: “What defines our present condition is how the moral panics are used to rally a civilian army that revels in the demise of the nonconforming opposition…. The Russia-Ukraine War is an easy lightning rod that the government and established centers of power in society can use to demonize Americans who hold the wrong view.”
This “wrong view” is often merely a more nuanced and contextualized view of the situation than what is found in mainstream legacy media. “The answer for why Americans pine for more war is probably complicated, but it’s clear that they generally hold simplistic views of the situation over there.”
Perhaps it is people’s resignation to the idea that the history and context of the conflict are too complicated to grasp that leads them to accept the simplistic narrative they are fed. Consequently, popular virtue signaling seems to be centered around criticism of Vladimir Putin and conceding nothing to him (even if this comes at the expense of Ukrainians themselves). But noninterventionism takes the sensible position that Putin is not our leader and that thus Americans can’t hold him accountable for bad behavior. Conversely, if we at least acknowledge the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s role in provoking this conflict, we can work toward holding our own leaders accountable and press them to create a more diplomacy-friendly atmosphere.
Not even the crafters of the Bill of Rights believed that. A careful reading of the First Amendment reveals that it doesn’t purport to give any rights to anyone. Instead, the wording states that Congress (and implicitly the rest of the federal government) is prohibited from infringing on people’s right of free speech.
Thus when the government enacts a law or adopts a measure that infringes on freedom of speech, leftists are relegated to saying, “We understand that you have given us this important privilege but please be nice and don’t infringe on it.” Libertarians, on the other hand, say, “You have no legitimate authority to do that and so stop it immediately or else we will alter you or abolish you!”
One of the central defects among leftists (that is, “liberals,” progressives, socialists, or interventionists) is their wrong-headed view of the nature of people’s rights. Their belief on this issue is one of the distinguishing characteristics between leftists and libertarians.
Leftists believe that people’s rights come from the government or from the Constitution. As such, they view rights not so much as rights but rather more as government-granted privileges.
Libertarians, on the other hand, believe that people’s rights are endowed in them by nature and God and, therefore, that people’s rights preexist government and the Constitution. We hold that the main purpose of government is to serve as our servant whose job is to protect the exercise of our natural, God-given rights.
A good example of this leftist mindset was recently expressed in a fundraising letter I received from a leftist group called the Daily Kos. The letter stated that freedom of speech is “one of those rights granted to us in Bill of Rights.” It went on to refer to “our First Amendment rights.”
Not even the crafters of the Bill of Rights believed that. A careful reading of the First Amendment reveals that it doesn’t purport to give any rights to anyone. Instead, the wording states that Congress (and implicitly the rest of the federal government) is prohibited from infringing on people’s right of free speech.
In other words, unlike American leftists today, our American ancestors didn’t believe that people’s rights come from the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or from the government. They believed in what the Declaration of Independence stated — that man’s rights come from nature and God and that it is the responsibility of government to protect, not destroy, the exercise of such rights.
We are not just talking about a semantical difference here. The difference between how leftists and libertarians view the nature of rights has profound consequences.
Given that leftists believe that their rights come from the government, they necessarily put themselves in a position of pleading, or perhaps even begging, that government go easy on them — that is, that government officials give them more latitude in exercising their “rights.”
Thus, leftists view freedom as living on a leash — they just want the government to let them have a longer leash. What happens when the government begins reining in the leash? Leftists have no principled argument to make against what the government is doing. Since people’s rights come from government, leftists believe, then government can legitimately rein in the leash whenever it wants.
Not so with libertarians. Unlike leftists, we are not relegated to pleading with or begging the government to treat us nicely. That’s because for us our rights don’t come from government. They preexist government. Government officials are nothing more than our servants whose job is to protect our rights. If they fail or refuse to do so — or if they use their power to destroy or infringe our rights — we have the right to alter or even abolish government and restore its rightful responsibility — the responsibility to behave as our servants whose job is to protect the exercise of our preexisting natural, God-given rights.
Thus when the government enacts a law or adopts a measure that infringes on freedom of speech, leftists are relegated to saying, “We understand that you have given us this important privilege but please be nice and don’t infringe on it.” Libertarians, on the other hand, say, “You have no legitimate authority to do that and so stop it immediately or else we will alter you or abolish you!”
The leftist view of the nature of rights is one reason why you can never count on leftists to protect our rights and liberties. Anyone who wants a genuine defense of our rights and liberties needs to join up with us libertarians.
Some might ask what’s the point of an article about a failed proposal aside from it being interesting. The point was not to talk about the success of the movement, but to highlight that there is a hunger for creative and unorthodox solutions in red America. Tens of millions of people feel the tendrils of leftism and authoritarianism tightening around their throat. They are ready to consider solutions they would have scoffed at just a decade ago.
Neil Sedaka said it best – “breaking up is hard to do”. Ask any 16-year-old and they’ll tell you that’s certainly true, but Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) recently made headlines when she suggested not just a breakup, but a “National Divorce” on social media. Of course, there was the typical incoherent shrieking and pearl clutching from progressives, neoconservatives, and other lizard-people, but there was also general acknowledgement from many regular folks that a “National Divorce” may be the only long-term solution.
We Need to Talk…
It should go without saying that our current political arrangement is not working. 2020 saw not just the Covid-19 insanity, but political violence where people were literally shooting each other in the street. Add to that the disturbing new polling data that revealed 48% of Democrats support “quarantine camps” for those who won’t take the recommended “medical interventions” and it seems like the only solution is to exit this abusive relationship.
But the focus on a national divorce perpetuates the same folly that has plagued libertarians and our allies on the right for years: focusing on the national to the exclusion of the state and local. The title of “county executive” may not be as sexy as “President of the United States”, but if the past 22 months have taught us anything, it is that these local offices matter insofar as they can determine how “normal” and free your day-to-day life is. Rather than talking strictly of a national divorce, we should be advocating small-scale secession as well.
Counties leaving their current states and cities leaving their current counties to join neighboring areas that more closely align with their politics should be a part of popular political discourse. Often the biggest barrier secession movements face is the widely held (albeit ludicrous) belief that our current set of lines on a map are sacred and must be preserved, and anyone who would change these lines in any way just pines for the good ‘ole days when they could own other people as property.
Secession in the Empire State
New York state has always been ripe for secession movements. Extreme political division between Downstate (“the city”) and Upstate (not “the city”) have prompted several movements aiming to split the Empire State in two. The secessionist movement of 1969 saw New Yorkers unhappy that upstate had so much control over their politics at the state level and proposed that New York City become the 51st state. 2003 and 2008 saw similar pushes from downstate citing “paying more than they receive” in taxes.
Talk of separation didn’t stop there. In 2015, the push for breaking up was led by Upstate, rural and red, against Downstate, urban and blue. Upstate has not been represented in state level politics for some time – the S.A.F.E. Act (a slew of draconian gun control laws) passed in 2013, and in 2014 Governor Cuomo banned hydrofracking (an important industry for upstaters).
In other words, upstate New Yorkers are being governed by urban elites – people who not only have completely different values and worldviews but look upon them with disdain and derision.
This should sound familiar to you. The situation in New York is eerily similar to that of the United States as a whole. Comparing the electoral map of the 2020 presidential election and the 2018 New York gubernatorial election (both victories for the ‘Dems) make this abundantly clear – big cities dictate policy to the detriment of everyone else.
The recent secession movement generated three main proposals: the first was the generic two-state solution; the second involved several counties in the Southern Tier (right above Pennsylvania) becoming part of Pennsylvania. Both ideas ran into an enormous roadblock called the Constitution. Per Article IV Section III, anytime a new state is to be created from an existing state, or parts of one state leave for another state, the approval of both state legislatures and Congress must be obtained. This is a daunting task, to say the least.
The third proposal comes from the Divide NY Caucus and would circumvent the Constitution –in a good way…not a “Commerce Clause” sort of way. There are no constitutional barriers if no new state is being created, so the Divide NY plan would split the state into three autonomous regions – New York (NYC), Montauk (NYC’s immediate suburbs), and New Amsterdam (everything else).
Partition Instead of Secession?
Each region would basically be its own state, responsible for electing its own governor and legislature, as well as dictating its own policies and taxes. But here’s the kicker, “New York State”, as recognized by the federal government, would still exist. The current “governor” would occupy a position akin to that of the Queen of England, but all federal representation would remain the same. There would be no changes to the number of states in the Union or the territory controlled by each state, so Congress is not involved, and since no other state is involved either, the bill would only need to survive one legislature.
Divide NY’s proposal became NY Senate Bill S5416 and dealt with many of the issues commonly associated with secession movements – namely, who would get what. The exhaustive 24-page bill details how the state’s university system, prisons and courts, and roadways would be divided. Sadly, it didn’t make it out of committee, but has been introduced again for the 2022 legislative session.
The proposal isn’t perfect, since it likely means that awful federal representatives like Chuck Schumer and Kirstin Gillibrand would keep their jobs, but virtually all New Yorkers would be better off. Downstate would free themselves from what they perceive as the “free-loading moochers” Upstate, and Upstate would no longer have to answer to the insane hypochondriacs and left-wing ideologues Downstate. But even if it didn’t make everyone better off, man is entitled to self-determination, and that right should be respected and exercised. Period.
Some might ask what’s the point of an article about a failed proposal aside from it being interesting. The point was not to talk about the success of the movement, but to highlight that there is a hunger for creative and unorthodox solutions in red America. Tens of millions of people feel the tendrils of leftism and authoritarianism tightening around their throat. They are ready to consider solutions they would have scoffed at just a decade ago. They are looking for solutions at every level – solutions that the liberty movement had embraced long ago. It might be up to us to spread the message of separation and rebuilding. A message that says, yes, even though mommy and daddy love you very much, they just can’t live together anymore. Author:
MCViewPoint 