LL 2008 Straw Poll - Who is your favorite Presidential candidate?

[lew]

Originally Posted by nbiggershaft

So, letting the south cede, letting germany brutally take over europe and Japan brutally take over the pacific are better alternatives to you than a war.

Letting the South secede would have been a better course of action, absofuckinglutely. The Civil War cost a million American lives. And all for what? For Lincoln's tarrif system and implementation of the American System. No thanks. I'd rather a million Americans be left alive, thank you.


WWI was pure interventionism and directly led to WWII. It is very likely there would have been no WWII if we hadn't intervened into WWI. Our government was never supposed to go to war unless we were directly attacked.

Regardless, WWII is the only semi justified war we've been involved with in the past 150 years. We defeated German Nazism, Italian Fascism, and Japanese Imperalism. I'm glad we did. However, there is NO justification for Lincoln's War and very little justification for WWI. Likewise, there is ZERO justification for every war we've been involved in since WWII. (except for Afganistan)

[nbiggershaft]

Originally Posted by lew

Letting the South secede would have been a better course of action, absofuckinglutely. The Civil War cost a million American lives. And all for what? For Lincoln's tarrif system and implementation of the American System. No thanks. I'd rather a million Americans be left alive, thank you.


WWI was pure interventionism and directly led to WWII. It is very likely there would have been no WWII if we hadn't intervened into WWI. Our government was never supposed to go to war unless we were directly attacked.

Regardless, WWII is the only semi justified war we've been involved with in the past 150 years. We defeated German Nazism, Italian Fascism, and Japanese Imperalism. I'm glad we did. However, there is NO justification for Lincoln's War and very little justification for WWI. Likewise, there is ZERO justification for every war we've been involved in since WWII. (except for Afganistan)

Don't bullshit me with nostalgia about a million lives in the civil war, neither you, nor anyone else alive today cares about actual lives lost in the civil war other than look at statistics and going, 'wow thats alot of people, time for me to go about my day'.
As for no war justified since, there are a few million Koreans who think otherwise.

[lew]

Originally Posted by nbiggershaft

Don't bullshit me with nostalgia about a million lives in the civil war, neither you, nor anyone else alive today cares about actual lives lost in the civil war other than look at statistics and going, 'wow thats alot of people, time for me to go about my day'.
As for no war justified since, there are a few million Koreans who think otherwise.

I guess you got me there

[thomez]

States were not supposed to ever attempt to secede

[Dumpy Dooby]

Originally Posted by lew

Letting the South secede would have been a better course of action, absofuckinglutely. The Civil War cost a million American lives. And all for what? For Lincoln's tarrif system and implementation of the American System. No thanks. I'd rather a million Americans be left alive, thank you.


WWI was pure interventionism and directly led to WWII. It is very likely there would have been no WWII if we hadn't intervened into WWI. Our government was never supposed to go to war unless we were directly attacked.

Regardless, WWII is the only semi justified war we've been involved with in the past 150 years. We defeated German Nazism, Italian Fascism, and Japanese Imperalism. I'm glad we did. However, there is NO justification for Lincoln's War and very little justification for WWI. Likewise, there is ZERO justification for every war we've been involved in since WWII. (except for Afganistan)

The idea was that the United States owns all of the land within its jurisdiction, i.e., it has complete sovereignty. Therefore, if a State secedes, it is essentially stealing land from the United States. Lincoln, essentially, was protecting what he believed rightfully belonged to the United States.

In my opinion, that ought not be the case. The United States should only have jurisdiction within the States if the states are willingly granting the United States that privilege. The States should be able to opt out of the Union at any time, but if they have any debt, the United States should be able to collect on that regardless of whether or not the state is a member of the Union.

The Fourteenth Amendment made sure there was no longer any confusion regarding the matter. It successfully put Lincoln's interpretation into the Constitution itself. Personally, I think that was a weasel maneuver. They made sure to hurry up and get that Amendment out there before the former members of the Confederacy were able to properly reestablish themselves, and I don't think that Fourteenth Amendment should be considered to have been properly ratified because of that dishonesty.

There's no way that anyone that actually cares about liberty would ever advocate Lincoln's dual-citizenship proposal. The Fourteenth Amendment is arguably the worst Amendment to the Constitution, as it granted a lot of power to the United States in that it allowed the United States to act as a state with limitless power, so as long as the United States grants itself that power. This implementation of an all-powerful sovereignty is what the Founding Fathers feared the most, with the notable exception of Hamilton.

[thomez]

Originally Posted by Dumpy Dooby

The States should be able to opt out of the Union at any time, but if they have any debt, the United States should be able to collect on that regardless of whether or not the state is a member of the Union.

it was clear that this was not the case during ratification

This implementation of an all-powerful sovereignty is what the Founding Fathers feared the most, with the notable exception of Hamilton.

haha omg, look I'm wrong again!

[lew]

Originally Posted by thomez

States were not supposed to ever attempt to secede

The Founding Fathers didn't want them to secede of course, because they wanted this country to survive together. However, they were for a states right to secede, if it chose that path.

[Bryan Morton]

The Real Jefferson - Mises Institute

"It is astonishing that Jeffersonian scholars have paid so little attention to the states'-rights aspect of Jefferson’s thought. If one reads the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, Jefferson appears to be the father of the Confederate States of America much more that of the United States. Here, Jefferson sought to provide a constitutional interpretation that would at least in principle prevent the union from "consolidating." He wanted to keep a system of loose federalism very similar to the one embodied in the Articles of Confederation.
Jefferson took advantage of the first opportunity in which the federalists openly disregarded the Constitution to address problems concerning the relationship between the federal government and the states, and his interpretation placed further limitations to federal power on the grounds that the U.S. were established as a republic based on states’ as well as individual rights.
The occasion was the approval of two acts that posed a serious threat to the system of American liberties. The Alien and Sedition Laws were approved in 1798 (under this law, you could be sent to prison for criticizing the president). The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, drawn respectively by Madison and Jefferson, were the opposition answer to those laws.
For the first time in American history, Jefferson outlined the political and juridical doctrine of the "State rights school" that became the standard way of viewing relations between States and Nation in the Southern states during the 19th century, up to the end of the War for Southern Independence.
Revived and perfected by John C. Calhoun, this doctrine became the heart of the controversy between the two sections of the country. Jefferson asserted that the States had created a federal government as a simple agent, subordinate to them, for limited and well-defined functions, and that the federal government did not have any right to expand its own authority.
Each individual State, as far as the controversies regarding the Constitution were concerned, had the right to determine when the compact had been breached, and what measures were most appropriate to restore the violated order and redress the wrong. Thus, it was a right (explicitly called by Jefferson "natural," therefore sacred) of each State to pronounce the illegitimacy of an act of Congress contrary to the constitutional compact.
Jefferson’s account of the nature of the Union--a voluntary contract among free and independent States in order to establish a common caretaker for few and enumerated things--contains a great deal of common sense. In a nutshell, the idea behind the Resolutions is as follows: the States are the ultimate judges of the constitutionality of federal legislation. This requires a rigorously voluntary framework.
But the Supreme Court, a branch of the federal government, at the time was already becoming what it is now, that is to say the arbiter of conflicts between the States and the federal government. In this case, the constitutional framework is threatened, since the federal government, not the Constitution, becomes the judge of its own expansion. More generally, if the States are expected to obey any federal law, regardless of whether the act had been issued according to the Constitution, only lip service is paid to the system of guarantees known as "federalism."
Despite the ratification of the federal Constitution, Jefferson believed that vis-à-vis each other, the States remained like individuals in the "state of nature." To characterize the true nature of the American union, for Jefferson, it was sufficient to transpose the Lockean natural rights model from individuals to the States. He never appealed to the theory of sovereignty (a term that does not even appear in his original draft of the Resolutions) to claim that the States are "free and independent": their liberty and independence lie in the nature of the bond in which they find themselves, and not in the somewhat metaphysical property of being "original political communities."
Despite the Constitution, the States retain all of their natural rights with respect to one another--exactly like individuals in a "state of nature." Jefferson’s appeal to nullification was a peculiar application of the theory of natural rights: a "state’s natural right," the right of nullification, was entirely within the realm of the federal compact, and was by no means an extra-constitutional remedy. In Jefferson’s opinion, such a right derived entirely from the nature of the American union, as it had been historically constructed.
Jefferson understood better than anybody else in his generation that Congress was the real heir to the king and that the concentration of powers in the federal center would have brought about "a government of discretion." To this ultimate evil he preferred secession, as he wrote again and again. So, yes, Jefferson’s goal was the preservation of men’s natural rights, but he believed that the best way to reach that was through a strict territorial division of power.
Of course there were many inconsistencies in Jefferson’s writings, and his behavior in politics often contradicted his stated political philosophy. That said, it remains indisputably true that Jefferson was a Lockean who believed in the natural right of property and in the rights of the states as independent political entities to determine their own destinies. That so many scholars are unwilling to face these truths reflects, not contrary evidence in Jefferson’s writing, but rather the bias and wishful thinking of the academic class."


When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession
"Southern states had the right to secede, if sufficient provocation warranted dissolution of the Union. Adams insists that the very rationale for the American War of Independence against British rule in the 18th century had been the right of people to separate themselves from one political authority and form a new government and political entity. If this was true in 1776, how could it be any less true in 1861?"

Secession and Liberty

The federal system of government that was created by the founding fathers was designed explicitly to deter this outcome, but that system was overthrown in 1865. The founders understood that democracy would inevitably evolve into a system of legalized plunder unless the plundered were given numerous escape routes and constitutional protections such as the separation of powers, the Bill of Rights, election of senators by state legislators, the electoral college, no income taxation, most governmental functions performed at the state and local levels, and myriad other constitutional limitations on the powers of the central government.

The most important protection was the right of secession, which Peter Applebome of the New York Times suggests we should revive in light of the election returns. This was quite natural, for the United States were founded as the direct result of a war of secession waged against Great Britain. The very principle of the American Revolution was the right of secession against tyrannical government. The founders understood that even the threat of secession would hold would-be governmental tyrants in check.

In his 1801 First Inaugural Address one of the first things Thomas Jefferson did was to support the right of secession. "If there be any among us who wish to dissolve the Union or to change its republican form," the author of the Declaration of Independence said, "let them stand undisturbed, as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."

Jefferson and James Madison were the authors of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 which held that "where powers were assumed by the national government which had not been granted by the states, nullification is the rightful remedy," and that every state has a right to "nullify of its own authority all assumptions of power by others. . ." Nullification of unconstitutional federal actions was a means of effectively seceding.

The election of 1800 was a battle between Jefferson and the supporters of limited, decentralized government and the Federalist Party, which advocated a more powerful and centralized state. The Federalists were so bitter about their electoral defeat that they immediately began plotting to secede from the Union. The important point about this episode is that this secession movement, which was based in New England, was led by some of the most distinguished men of the founding generation and was never opposed on principle by Jefferson or anyone else. It was argued that secession might have been an unwise strategy, but no one denied that states enjoyed a right of secession.

The leader of the New England secessionists was Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, who had served as George Washington’s chief of staff, his secretary of war and secretary of state, as well as a congressman and senator from Massachusetts. "The principles of our Revolution [of 1776] point to the remedy – a separation," Pickering wrote to George Cabot in 1803, for "the people of he East cannot reconcile their habits, views, and interests with those of the South and West." "The Eastern states must and will dissolve the Union and form a separate government," announced Senator James Hillhouse. Similar sentiments were expressed by such prominent New Englanders as Elbridge Gerry, John Quincy Adams, Fisher Ames, Josiah Quincy, and Joseph Story, among others.

The New England secession movement gained momentum for an entire decade, but ultimately failed at the Hartford Secession Convention of 1814. Throughout this struggle, wrote historian Edward Powell in Nullification and Secession in the United States, "the right of a state to withdraw from the Union was not disputed."

At the outbreak of the War for Southern Independence in 1861 the vast majority of Northern opinion leaders still believed that a right of secession was fundamental, and that the South should be allowed to go in peace. The abolitionist Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Daily Tribune and the preeminent journalist of his day, wrote on December 17, 1860 that "if tyranny and despotism justified the American Revolution of 1776, then we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861" (Howard Perkins, Northern Editorials on Secession). "Nine out of ten people of the North," Greeley wrote on February 5, 1861, "were opposed to forcing South Carolina to remain in the Union," for "the great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration . . . is that governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed." Therefore, if the southern states wanted to secede, "they have a clear right to do so."

Similar statements were made by newspapers all throughout the North on the eve of the war, and are perhaps best represented by an editorial in the Kenosha, Wisconsin Democrat, which on January 11, 1861, wrote that secession is "the very germ of liberty" and declared that "the right of secession inheres to the people of every sovereign state."

"If military force is used," the Bangor Daily Union wrote on November 13, 1860, then a state can only be seen "as a subject province and can never be a co-equal member of the American union."

Most of the top military commanders in the war (on both sides) were educated at West Point, where the one course on the U.S. Constitution was taught by the Philadelphia abolitionist William Rawle, who taught from his own book, A View of the Constitution. What Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, and others were taught about secession at West Point was that to deny a state the right of secession "would be inconsistent with the principle on which all our political systems are founded, which is, that the people have in all cases, a right to determine how they will be governed."

Secessionist No.9
The structure of the political system, the original intentions of some framers of the constitution, and the citizenry's prevailing understanding of the political order during the Early encouraged a diversity of opinions regarding the fundamental nature of the union. Concerns arose in many quarters during the Constitutional Convention and ratification process, especially among the Antifederalists who feared that an overbearing national government would assume the authority of the states. Article Two of the Articles of Confederation had contained explicit provisions for protecting states, initiating a system whereby "each state retains its sovereignty." Various early state constitutions included provisions outlining the primacy of states in the confederal arrangement, often at the expense of a unified political order. The most popular form of amendment requested during the state ratification conventions and proposed to the First Congress concerned a reserved powers clause.
The defenders of the Constitution argued such a provision was unnecessary. James Madison suggested in Federalist 39 that each state was "a sovereign body" only "bound by its voluntary act" of ratification. Other Federalists, including James Wilson, Alexander Hamilton, and John Marshall at the Virginia ratifying convention, held that such a proposal was already present in the Constitution and that the new government would only have the powers delegated to it. Opposition to and suspicion of the proposed Constitution on the grounds that it would infringe upon the privileged status of the states was widespread.
On the other hand, the advocates of state authority viewed the states as the repository of reserved power, and many believed that states were invested with an equal, and perhaps superior capacity to judge infractions against the federal government. The most significant assurances to this effect came in the Virginia ratifying convention from George Nicholas and Edmund Randolph. As the spokesmen for the committee that reported the instrument of ratification, they noted that the Constitution would only have the powers "expressly" delegated to it. If Federalists disagreed with the stress on state authority, they generally viewed a reserved power clause as innocuous, and Madison included such a provision among the amendments he introduced in 1789.
In the First Congress, Elbridge Gerry, a founder and Antifederalist elected to the House of Representatives, introduced a proposal reminiscent of the Articles, leaving to the states all powers "not expressly delegated" to the federal government. Gerry's proposal was defeated, in part due to concerns about the similarity between the language of his amendment and the Articles. Others who took a states' rights or strict constructionist view of the Constitution, including Thomas Jefferson, persisted in defending state power. Before ratification of the Tenth Amendment, Jefferson advised President Washington that incorporating a national bank was unconstitutional. Jefferson would later compose the Kentucky Resolutions, which defended the states as the sovereign building blocks of the American nation and noted that the states retained a means of protection when threatened. To describe the process of state action Jefferson supplied a new term, nullification, to note the immediacy and severity of the "remedy" necessary to prohibit the federal government from absorbing state authority.
Defenders of the federal government, sometimes described as nationalists or loose constructionists, argued that the Congress must assume more power if the needs of the country were to be met. Most prominent among the advocates of increased federal authority was Alexander Hamilton. For Hamilton, the explicit protection of state perogratives was unnecessary as the political order already protected states. The Constitution, according to the nationalists, also contained provisions for the exercise of federal power, including the "necessary and proper" and "supremacy" clauses.
The Supreme Court addressed the controversy in its McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) decision. The High Court upheld the constitutionality of a national bank, even though such an institution was not specified in the Constitution. In dismissing a strict delineation of state and federal authority, the Court under the leadership of John Marshall extended the powers of Congress at the expense of the states. On the other hand, the Marshall Court affirmed the excepted notion that police powers belonged exclusively to the states. Under Chief Roger Brooke Taney (1836-1854), the Court assumed more of a strict constructionist posture.
The emerging defense of state authority, and ultimately, was an interpretation of the American political experience, with an emphasis upon the original dispersion of authority, sovereignty, and restraint within the Constitution of 1787. According to understanding, offered by Calhoun and Hayne among others, the original system was predicated upon reserving the states' sphere of authority, while delegating sufficient authority for particular and limited responsibility to the general government. For Calhoun, this original diffusion, buttressed by a prudent mode of popular rule, was the primary achievement of American politics. A necessary corollary to his understanding of the regime's historical evolution was the need to perpetuate the original vision of the Union for posterity's sake: "The Union: Next to our liberty, the most dear; may we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the states and distributing equally the benefit and the burden of Union," urged Calhoun. If, as Calhoun suggested, America had "departed" from its "original character and structure," a recovery of the older design was necessary.
For the defenders of states' rights and secession, the Declaration of Independence initiated the legitimate delineation of state and federal authority and a properly constituted mode of popular rule through first articulating the primary nature of the union. According to this view that was shared by Southerners and most Americans, the Declaration illuminated and explained the foundations of the American republic as also resting upon a political compact. In contradistinction to a social compact, a political compact did not unite individuals or governments. Instead, such an agreement formed a republic with the same equality of rights among the States composing the Union, as among the citizens composing the States themselves. The Declaration encouraged a political compact that had developed with "time and experience" into a model of political and social stability. The Declaration preserved the locus of authority within each individual state, and allowed for secession when government "becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it." For many Americans, the Declaration expressed the foundation for popular rule and a territorial republic that came to fruition in the Constitution. While the Declaration appropriately described the status of "Free and Independent States" as intrinsic to the republic, the document also confirmed the conceptional thesis of secessionist political theory: the states' "ordained" or created the republic.
If the Declaration supplied the prologue to the original design for the republic, it was the Articles of Confederation, the first American embodiment of the design, that incorporated this insight into the fundamental law of the regime. For Southerners, the provisions and language of the Articles served as an authentic precursor to the American Constitution. The Constitution of 1787 was incomprehensible without first assimilating the defense of states' rights contained in the Articles. Drafted in stages from 1776 to 1777, the Articles extended and revised the Declaration's ennobling of diffused authority and the delineation of state autonomy, while establishing popular rule based upon the deliberative, decentralized, community-centered participation of the citizenry. As in the case of the Declaration, the Articles perpetuated the original design for the territorial division of the country, into independent and sovereign States, on which the secessionist argument would later rest.

[thomez]

Originally Posted by lew

The Founding Fathers didn't want them to secede of course, because they wanted this country to survive together. However, they were for a states right to secede, if it chose that path.

I'd like to see some evidence of this

btw, I used to believe the same thing, until further reading

[thomez]

Originally Posted by Bryan Morton

When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession
[font=Times,Times New Roman]"Southern states had the right to secede, if sufficient provocation warranted dissolution of the Union. Adams insists that the very rationale for the American War of Independence against British rule in the 18th century had been the right of people to separate themselves from one political authority and form a new government and political entity. If this was true in 1776, how could it be any less true in 1861?"
[/color]

If the founders were OK with secession, they would have let states join the Union on a trial basis, as NY tried to do, with the option of leaving if they were unhappy. This was forced out of the ratification language in NY because the Union was supposed to be perpetual unless every state got together in a Continental Congress again and formed something new (as was done when going from Articles ---> Constitution). This is not what happened, thought it is easy to misconstrue it that way.

[lew]

Originally Posted by thomez

I'd like to see some evidence of this

btw, I used to believe the same thing, until further reading

I think the actual history of the Revolution speaks volumes regarding that.


States were voluntary when deciding whether to go to war.

States were voluntary when deciding to agree to the Articles of Confederation.

States were voluntary when deciding to agree to the Constitution.


The whole Revolution was a war of secession. If they didn't believe in, why engage in it?

[Rouger2]

Originally Posted by AntiCentrist

Neither Coolidge, nor Hoover, nor any other U.S. President, bore responsibility for the Great Depression of the 1930s. It was a global phenomenon that began with the crash of the Austrian stock market in Vienna. The economies of Britain, Germany, France, Canada, etc., collapsed just as thoroughly as did ours. But in retrospect, Harding was probably a better example than Coolidge.

Harding gets a lot of bad press because of the "Teapot Dome" scandal, but that scandal consisted of little more than the Secretary of the Interior taking some bribes in order to sell off some publicly-owned petroleum. Stuff like that goes on all the time now, the difference is no one gets in trouble for taking bribes anymore, and its not Harding's fault one of his Cabinet officers betrayed his administration. Wilsoon turned this country into a police state, but Harding dismantled that, after running on the platform of "A Return to Normalcy." Yet before dismantling that police state apparatus, he used it to round up most of the leaders of the Communist movement in this country, strip them of their citizenship, and deport them to the Soviet Union. Those people could have caused a lot of trouble for this country, had they been around during the Depression.

They say that Hoovers tight money policy deepened the depression and did not allow the econmy to come out of it when it was ready. World war two and Franklin Roosevelt pumped money into the economy bringing us out of the depression.

[thomez]

Originally Posted by lew

I think the actual history of the Revolution speaks volumes regarding that.


States were voluntary when deciding whether to go to war.

States were voluntary when deciding to agree to the Articles of Confederation.

States were voluntary when deciding to agree to the Constitution.


The whole Revolution was a war of secession. If they didn't believe in, why engage in it?

nobody would have been included in the union if they didn't ratify, but once ratified it was perpetual unless they basically unanimously agreed on something new, like the Articles ---> Constitution change.