Jeff Hummel’s “The Constitution as a Counter-Revolution”

by Stephan Kinsella on July 1, 2009

Sheldon Richman is right when he says:

On the Constitution, I strongly suggest you read Jeff Hummel’s “The Constitution as a Counter-Revolution” (pdf). When you know the real story of the Constitution, you will not want to go back to its original intent.

What a great piece by Hummel. It only reinforces my growing anti-constitutional sentimentalism that I wrote about in Goodbye 1776, 1789, Tom.

{ 6 comments… add one }

steven hines July 2, 2009, 6:45 am

That Hummel piece was very good. Thank you for linking it. To me, it drove home the fact that an incredible amount of propaganda is at work even in the minarchist libertarian movement.

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Tony July 3, 2009, 5:38 am

I thought the Hummel piece was quite a bit over the edge. For example:

until Congress was given direct jurisdiction over the states’ western lands. Here we encounter the first distortion in America’s constitutional myth.

Sorry, it is the “states’ western lands” which were mythical. For one thing, the British Crown still claimed them during the war. For another, the states had no business “claiming” them anyway, since they constituted merely a vast unsettled wilderness from which they merely hoped, eventually, some kind of benefit. They amounted to the same level of reality as my ‘claim’ on Copernicus crater on the moon.

They encouraged a plot among Washington’s officers, and a military coup loomed on the horizon. I don’t remember reading that Morris and his cronies “encouraged” this plot, and anyway the primary reason this plot ever got off the ground was the failure to pay the army appropriately.

Unfortunately, the war-induced nationalisation of the Northwest lands had shifted the burden of policing that territory from the states to a national force of some kind. The states never had policed the territory in any sense worthy of the name. The reason they agreed to the nationalization of the lands were that they recognized a real problem with their control of the areas.

Once Congress had repudiated its paper money, there should have been no obstacle to repudiating the debt as well…Of the remainder, $12 million were claims of the Continental Army for back pay, or of other public officials..

Ugh, this is terrible . Since Congress did one moderately wretched thing that was forced upon them by a series of stupid earlier choices, they should have compounded the evil with a truly atrociously evil choice to repudiate a just debt to its own soldiers??? This would have ensured another revolt.

As you can see, this article is full of half-truths, colored truths, innuendo, blatant ex-post-facto assumptions about acceptable options, etc. This is not careful work.

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Ahmad December 9, 2015, 5:53 am

… I think it is because Kinsella is more intsreeted in bringing Ignatieff down at the moment than he is about anything else. No. It’s because he is a lawyer, and understands the law a little better than you do. The government is just about to lose a disputed prosecution for non-compliance on the issue, and they’re going to lose it on the basis of the Charter of Rights. The long form census, you see, IS too intrusive according to the Charter. All these Liberal bloggers who are moaning and wailing about this issue are going to end up looking pretty stupid, I’m afraid. The public has responded with a collective ‘yawn’, and the more you try to generate enough faux outrage to make this an election issue, the more embarrassing your climbdown will be. (..but hey, what do I know? Go ahead and defeat the government at your earliest opportunity. Please…;)

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