That is a very simplistic and inaccurate way to judge California's debt responsibility.
California representatives and Senators voted to keep the Federal spending at ridiculously high levels. Their costs are commensurate with their support in running up the debt.
The nation currently owes something like 20 trillion in acknowledged debt, and about 150 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Again, mostly thanks to liberal states like New York and California. (Though California was not so Liberal in the past.)
Then stop posting about things that you neither care about or know about.
In order to solve a problem, one must know how one came to arrive at this condition.
I'm not inclined to find monsters in American history, but if there were monsters, not seeing the slaveowners as monsters is certainly troubling.
The difference here is that the North had slaveowners too, but did not care to do anything about the beam in their own eye. Therefore I don't give much credibility to their protestations of immorality on the part of others.
The immorality was a post hoc excuse to justify what they did, and what they did was to invade other people because they wanted to protect their money streams. And this is a significant point.
They didn't do what they did because of slavery. Indeed, they were bending over backwards to protect slavery just to keep control of that money engine and to protect their own markets.
Therefore they have no moral high ground from which to lecture the same Southern slaveholders they would have kept in business had they kept control of the money stream.
No. If you hadn't tried to secede over slavery, you might be able to play that card over some other issue.
Here we go again with this "slavery" business as if that had a f***ing thing to do with why the Federal government invaded these people.
Because you constantly focus on "slavery" as some significant point, you inherently assert that some other reason would have been justifiable.
Your only moral position is this: Disunion is illegal for any reason.
By making it only about slavery, you are instead arguing, "Disunion is only wrong when we don't like the reason."
The federal government would also be weaker if the Confederacy had won the war or if they had left without a war, but the whole country would be so much weaker that people would be complaining here about the spinelessness of Lincoln for not putting up a fight.
Weaker how? Unable to defend itself from foreign encroachment? I don't think it would have made any difference at all. When it comes to defense, the nation would have been as strong as it ever needed to be. The only difference is that the gargantuan federal government would serve only those purposes for which it was created rather than become some vast piggy bank for crony capitalists to raid, and for the rest of us to pay for.
If you demand absolute moral purity and political correctness on one side before you can condemn any evil on the other, you will be living with a lot of really bad things and no hope of remedying them. The best is the enemy of the good.
You are like a Stalinist who responded to talk of the Gulag by saying that we have prisons of our own in America, or like someone who wouldn't fight Germany or Japan because we have racists of our own over here.
This week you have already shown yourself to be a hypocrite, someone who condemns Lincoln for his beliefs and actions but would think and act in the same way if confronted with a secession situation today. So as a hypocrite yourself, it's hard for you to legitimately condemn anyone else for hypocrisy. But that's okay. Everybody is a hypocrite about one thing or another and to one degree or another. That's part of living in the real world.
The immorality was a post hoc excuse to justify what they did, and what they did was to invade other people because they wanted to protect their money streams.
Duh. Welcome to the real world. Impure people fight to defend what they believe in. As they fight or after they fight they come to realize that there are weaknesses or contradictions in their own positions and in their own society and they work to put things right. We fought the Nazis first and got rid of segregation later. If we'd waited to be morally pure first, we'd be under the Nazi boot even now. We also got rid of segregation because it made us unpopular in countries we wanted to win over. Self-interest, sure, but not simply narrow self interest. It was also an attempt to bring our practices into line with our professed beliefs.
Therefore they have no moral high ground from which to lecture the same Southern slaveholders they would have kept in business had they kept control of the money stream.
Who is "they"? At least a million people bought Uncle Tom's Cabin. At least a hundred thousand belonged to anti-slavery societies. I doubt they were all willing to keep slavers in business. As for the rest of the country, you are blaming them for being "nice" and wanting to please Southerners and not make waves. So whether Northerners oppose slavery or accept it, they can't win and are condemned by you.
Because you constantly focus on "slavery" as some significant point, you inherently assert that some other reason would have been justifiable.
Your only moral position is this: Disunion is illegal for any reason.
By making it only about slavery, you are instead arguing, "Disunion is only wrong when we don't like the reason."
All these years and you don't have a clue. Withdrawal from the union is possible by negotiated, mutual consent. I think most legal experts would agree with that now. But that doesn't mean that we have to love any particular secessionist movement.
You referred to unionists as "monsters" and implied that therefore the slaveowners you thought were "monsters" apparently weren't. Where is the logic in that? Why does the war make slaveowners innocent victims of "monsters"? And do you seriously think that when you make talk that way about monsters that nobody's going to bring up slavery?
That seems to be a trick of yours. You excuse slavery and slaveowners and then when somebody points out what you are doing you accuse them of always bringing up slavery and not having other arguments. It's your problem if you don't want to read or think.
Weaker how? Unable to defend itself from foreign encroachment? I don't think it would have made any difference at all. When it comes to defense, the nation would have been as strong as it ever needed to be. The only difference is that the gargantuan federal government would serve only those purposes for which it was created rather than become some vast piggy bank for crony capitalists to raid, and for the rest of us to pay for.
What have you been smoking? Breaking the nation up into two or more countries would mean making the continent a playground for foreign interests. I can see that you don't have a problem with that, but some people do. And breaking the country up into two or more nations would mean higher military budgets and more tariffs. It would also mean much more control over borders and the rest of society in your beloved Slave-onia. There probably would be less wealth, but more social instability and more government throughout the continent.