His points on Cato vs. Mises.

To illustrate: the oldest libertarians and other individualists were also boldly outspoken against slavery.

He says Mises harbors racists, is pro child-slavery, says the work on Lincoln isn't scholarly.

You're really going that far in your hatred to side with Fly and somehow support these notions?

Rockwell's and Paul's connections most recently... racist whites often hijacked libertarian views of government to advance their agenda. For example, people like George Wallace spouted off about state's rights and limited government when arguing for segregation. There are more examples, and this kind of stuff is not limited to libertarianism, but it still annoys me.

Welcome how opposition to federal government gets tied to racism and slavery http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbjdUkeN4jM

It's obvious how the 1st level thinking is:

1. Before the war there was slavery
2. After the war was no slavery
3. Therefore the war must have been about slavery and must have been great an just and the only option considering, after all, look at the results!
4. Therefore opposition to federal government must be in favor of slavery


Does that mean we should just never talk about fallacies involved in those steps, or factual history?

thb, Lincoln wasn't history's greatest monster. He was just in the top 5.

Because if I'm in your house with a gun and refuse to leave, that makes you the aggressor when you kick me out by force.

lol, yeah, the idea that governments exist at the consent of the governed is exclusive to libertarians!

*in before Corwin amendment.

Cue more demonization of Lincoln that is broadly intended to distract the reader from the fact that the southern states were willing to fight a war to prevent some goddamn Yankee bastard from taking away their God-given right to own slaves.

meh, still have no idea what your point is. whatever reason the South had for secession is irrelevant to any person who believes in government at the consent of the governed, which has been an overriding political philosophy since, when? I mean, even Hobbes recognized it.

My point is that Mises.org is a neverending source of hilarity and that people in this forum rely on it as their go-to source for "academic" support of their positions is also a neverending source of hilarity.

One aside, though, is that the situation is a bit better for libertarians than earlier up this page makes it seem. Even ignoring that the progressive left tends towards being pro-civil rights, your Reason/Cato libertarians are imo more prominent and common than your Mises/Rockwell cranks in society as a whole. This forum is disproportionately Rothbardian, and it is the Rothbardian brand that really attracts the hard right "paleo" cranks(by design!).

There is no way to fashion a platform that only smart people agree with, and that's a pretty terrible goal anyway. You just need to make sure that the dumber and crazier people who agree with you get stuck in a hole far away from the public(rather than, say, letting them edit your newsletter and ghostwrite bad things about black people).

Is this true? If so, I really have a tough time giving Paul the benefit of the doubt on this one. Even if he never read the newsletter you would think some friends/family would subscribe and tell him. If he doesn't really think it is racist or bad that is a different situation.

Hear, hear. This one especially annoyed me, both because it's in a mainstream publication but also because it perpetuates this idea that merely acknowledging cultural differences is an act of "racism."

His argument is bunk to begin with imo because it starts out by saying that you can choose to discriminate by race in the photo selection if race is germane to the product being offered--i.e., he's acknowledging that different races don't act the same, don't buy the same things, don't want to see the same things in the advertisements of products they buy. Black people might not be as attracted to a local rap music store in Newark that has pictures of a bunch of white guys listening to headphones. This is obvious, and a businessperson taking this into consideration is not in any way racism.

His Liechtenstein comment is horrible for self-evident reasons. The weight comment is just wrong beyond belief. You don't see fat people in supermarket ads, even though most people are fat. I'm sure this particular dude is not willing to put a photo of a fat person on his site, or one of a dwarf, or of someone in a wheelchair, or of a 90 year old woman. If a gun shop in Wyoming doesn't want to show any pictures of women in the store window, is that sexist? Same principles seems to apply.

This type of stuff is just so lazy.

No, it isn't true.

The southern states weren't any better than the norther states. They were, after all, states. But can we please dispense with this crock that the war was fought over slavery? Shall we post Lincoln's first inaugural address again?

I really doubt the American Civil War would have taken place if slavery had never existed. Slavery was always a hot topic of debate in American politics. The Senate had to be constantly balanced between slave states and free states so that one side couldn't have more power than the other.

No. Lew Rockwell isn't a racist. But I'm sure that Fly is happy to see that the smears are still working.

Lot's of **** on LRC annoys me. Particularly when Gary North starts gibbering about evolution. That doesn't make Lew or any other particular LRC contributor a racist.

That isn't what I said. I didn't even say that the slavery issue wasn't a contributing factor. It just wasn't the proximate cause. The proximate cause was import tariffs that fell disproportionately on the South which were then spent on political cronyism in the north. The bulk of Federal revenues were paid by the south while the bulk of the same was disbursed in the north. It was the same sore spot that almost led to southern states seceding decades earlier due to the Tariff of Abominations.

But I'm sure Fly will be along to explain how talking about these things is just "neo-Confederate apologetics" from "racists."

I don't know anything about Levin. Can you explain exactly why the bolded is the case?

This is not Fly's point about racism at all. His point is to smear them as racists because they are libertarians and he hates libertarians.

YES. If you're going to slam on LRC for stupidty, can you at least retrict it to **** that is actually TRUE? There's enough of that to go around imo.

I'm not trying to say I "got ya" but I mean c'mon... these two posts seem to kind of contradict each other. Could you try to be clearer in the future? KTHNXBYE

Consider the second a clarification of the first then.

Done.

I invite anyone who thinks that there may be truth to this to just go ahead and read the statements of secession put out by the various states. Here is South Carolina's. Here are some more. Even South Carolina, which was at teh center of the whole "Tariff of Abominations" stuff, did not mention tariffs at all in its statement.