StephanKinsella.com

From LewRockwell.com July 5, 2003

Some LRC readers may recall a debate in the pages of Liberty magazine and various blogs, concerning libertarian attorney Timothy Sandefur’s pro-Union views on the War Between the States. It started with Sandefur’s July 2002 article Liberty and Union, Now and Forever, which elicited various libertarian critics (including mine). Sandefur responded in his December 2002 Liberty article Why Secession Was Wrong; some libertarians, including Joseph Sobran and myself, hit the ball back over the net, and Sandefur has posted yet another response to these and other critiques on his web site.

Readers interested in the sordid details can peruse these links. However here I want to make a narrow point. Sandefur repeatedly points to the evil of slavery and the need to end it as justification for the war. For example, he writes, admitting his hyperbole, “slavery is so evil that it was worth all the awful depredations of the Civil War to end it, and would have been worth more”.

And yet he states the essential issue as follows: “The question of the Civil War is really two questions: first, Is there a Constitutional right to secede? If the answer to the first question is no (and it is), then the second question is, Was the South engaging in a legitimate act of revolution?”

He concludes that there is no constitutional right to secede (for reasons which are not relevant here). In other words, a State may leave the Union only: (a) with the permission of Congress; or (b) via a “legitimate act of revolution”. Otherwise, if a State tries to quit the Union, the Federal government may use armed force to stop what Sandefur terms a “criminal conspiracy”.

Since Congress obviously did not consent to the Confederate States’ secession, the question is whether it was a legitimate act of revolution. Now Sandefur states that it was not, because “the Southern states could not legitimately claim a right to revolt in defense of slavery”. Revolution is an act in defense of rights, therefore, secession in furtherance of the violation of rights (slavery) is simply not revolution. The South was not responding to aggression by the North, and “its firing on Fort Sumter was therefore an initiation of force. The President being Constitutionally required to see that the laws — including the Supreme Law of The Land — be enforced, Lincoln was therefore right to enforce the Constitution, at point of arms, if necessary.”

Note how Sandefur neatly links his passionate opposition to slavery and its moral justification for the war, to his theoretical framework regarding the constitutional right to secede. According to Sandefur, a state can secede if it gets permission from Congress; or if it is engaged in a legitimate revolution. However, a state seceding for the purpose of upholding slavery is not engaged in a legitimate revolution. In fact he tries to explicitly link slavery to the question of the legitimacy of revolution: “It is true that slavery is immaterial to the question of whether secession is Constitutional. But if we answer that question in the negative, we move to the second question [of whether there is a legitimate revolution]: and in that discussion, slavery is central.”

But what I wanted to point out is this: slavery is completely irrelevant to Sandefur’s argument. Here’s why. Sandefur repeatedly states that legitimate revolution is one that is in response to invasions of rights by the federal government. As he writes, “revolution is justified only as a form of self-defense against rulers who have engaged in a train of abuses and usurpations against those individual rights which just governments protect. This alone distinguishes an act of revolution from a mere criminal conspiracy.”

According to this theory, even if none of the United States had had slavery in 1861, it would still have been a “mere criminal conspiracy” for the South to secede, without permission from Congress. This is because the South, according to Sandefur, would not have been “able to point to a long train of abuses pursuing the design of reducing them to despotism”. In other words, even if slavery had already been abolished, the Union would be justified in using armed force to subdue a seceding State, unless the State was engaged in “revolution” in response to acts of “despotism” by the Union.

Sandefur’s real position is that, barring acts of despotism by the central government, it may legitimately use armed force to prevent the secession of its States. This view would find even fewer libertarian adherents which is, I venture, the reason why he focuses on the evil of slavery — to mask the true implications of his theory.

My latest article, Supreme Confusion, Or, A Libertarian Defense of Affirmative Action, discusses the recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions on gay rights and affirmative action.

On the phone with my dad last night, he told me to turn on the TV because “Hitler: The Rise of Evil–Part 2” was about to come on. I said, “That’s alright, I don’t need to, I already lived through Clinton’s second administration.” But on second thought, I shouldn’t be comparing Clinton’s evil to Hitler’s. No. That’s improper. Because as an adherent of the Austrian school of economics I should realize that evil is not quantifiable and therefore it’s difficult to compare.

Cool program: CaptureWiz 1.1: “Capture anything on your screen and print, save, e-mail, or sticky-note it quickly with this virtual camera” (free to try).

Honda put together this extremely cool ad to highlight the inner workings of one of its new cars. You will think it’s got to be computer generated or special effects, but it’s actually real.

Look at these quotes pulled from Vitamins: More May Be Too Many, NY Times, April 29, 2003. What exactly do nutritionists and medical “experts” actually know about what nutrients are really good for, or harmful to, us? Seems like all guesswork and voodoo to me.

“Until recently, there was little concern about vitamin A and bone health.” Now, she added, “we may have to rethink the issues.”

“All of a sudden, scientists are rearing back and saying, `Wait a minute, do we really know that we need this and do we really know that we need that?'”

“We don’t know what ingredient in a healthy diet is responsible for which condition.”

“So far, the folic acid studies are suggestive, not definitive. But Dr. Fletcher said, “If I were a betting man, I’d bet on it.”

“I think it’s a good form of insurance,” Dr. Manson said. “I don’t think there’s a significant downside. We don’t have the evidence yet that it is beneficial.”

High levels of homocysteine are associated with increased risks of heart disease, but there is no study showing definitively that reducing homocysteine levels protects against heart disease.

“Our position,” she said, “is that most people, literally most people, would benefit from taking a multivitamin every day.”

Cool article on buzzword proliferation–If Using Buzzwords is How You Roll, Don’t Be Surprised by the Hatin’, by Nathan Johnson. Writes Johnson: “What is it about certain words that makes them so popular? Do you know what “krunk,” “off the chizain” and “fo shizzle” mean? Possibly. Would you use them in polite conversation – say, in a business meeting, during a parent/teacher conference, at church, during a job performance review? If you don’t know, let me tell you: No, not unless you were joking. Yet, I’ll bet you think you know what equally nebulous terms like “robust,” “end-to-end,” “turnkey” and “scalable” mean. A seemingly infinite number of corporations use them every day to describe products and services.”

From an article in the New York Law Journal (April 17, 2003): “The CIA recently estimated the gross national product of Iraq at about $59 billion. It’s a fair bet that the ultimate cost of the country’s postwar reconstruction will far exceed that figure. So while many issues relating to how Iraq’s reconstruction will proceed — and who will pay — remain unsettled and highly controversial, lawyers have already begun considering how they and their clients can get a piece of the action.” Wow, what a coincidence–I was just thinking the other day–the problem with Iraq is they have a shortage of lawyers.

Interesting article about “whether patents are an impediment to the industry, a necessary evil or just a high-visibility nuisance”. As a patent-lawyer friend said about this article, “It’s good that this is becoming a more mainstream public policy debate, but scary how ill informed and even illogical the debate is.” More pro-/con-IP resources and information.

What can I say–that’s the title I came up with for the latest patent to issue for my company, Applied Optoelectronics, Inc. Hey, I haven’t had any published articles to blog lately, this was the best I could do. More patents here.

New Harvard Study Heats up ‘Global Warming’ Debate–yes, HARVARD (another article: Greenhouse gases not culprit, study suggests). A few choice snippets:

A new scientific review of climate history contends that the earth was warmer during the Middle Ages than it is today, supplying ammunition to one critic of the environmental movement who claims concern over “global warming” has been “sheer folly.”

A team of Harvard University scientists examined 1,000 years of global temperatures and reviewed more than 240 scientific journals from the past 40 years and concluded that despite man’s influence on our environment, current temperatures are not as warm as during the Middle Ages.

“This new study merely affirms the obvious: climate alarmism based on a few years’ or even a century’s data is sheer folly, reminding us again that geological cycles spanning millennia do not share the rush of agenda-driven scientists or activists,” Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the free-market environmental think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute, told CNSNews.com.

The Harvard study is set to be published this spring in the journal Energy and Environment. According to the study, a global medieval warming period lasting from about 800 to 1300 A.D. was followed by a Little Ice Age between the years 1300 to 1900. The study also states that the earth has been warming slightly since 1900.

The study is significant because it refutes the notion that current temperatures are the warmest ever and calls into question much of the warming effect caused by the so-called greenhouse gases from industrial plants and automobiles.

Green groups will be “devastated and panicked” by this new research, according to Horner, which he insists was not tainted by special interests or politics.

I LOVE IT!