Posted on 02/21/2007 2:44:52 PM PST by don-o
"So, the bottom line to this damn rant (as Vicomte13 is most likely chortling "I can't BELIEVE he went and DID that!") is that the reason I am supporting Duncan Hunter for President in '08 is because I refuse to compromise conservative principles ANYMORE!"
Actually, I largely agree with your assessments of Bush's foreign policy, and of the border situation, and I too will be supporting Duncan Hunter, of all of the people I have seen present themselves thus far, in the primaries.
"And the first time to his cousin?"
Well, actually we're ALL cousins.
Why does the fact that the state is imposing the rules, as opposed to the federal government or the United Nations or God or the town council, make any difference from a libertarian perspective?
Isn't the problem that somebody is using power to impose a rule on you that he has no business imposing at all, no matter WHERE he sits?
I am sorry, but I do not see how state's rights, or any rights other than individual rights, have anything whatever to do with libertarianism.
States do not exist, neither do cities, except as figments of people's imaginations. Individuals do literally exist. States are not hurt, offended, or otherwise afflicted in any way no matter what happens to them. They are corporate playthings of human beings. So, the notion that "states" have "rights", and that THIS is the center of libertarianism strikes me as highly confused, or at any rate confusing.
States rights is a peculiarly American obsession which began back at the time of the drafting of the US Constitution, primarily over the issue of slavery. The question was always a simple one: do governmental subdivisions of the country have a strong enough interest in political independence that they have the right to allow their residents, within those states, to vote for laws that literally do ANYTHING to other individual humans, including permitting their enslavement and murder by others.
The answer before the Civil War was YES, and States Rights was the rallying cry for that. States Rights in American history MEANT the right of states of enslave and kill a certain number of individuals within those states, if the majority wanted to do it. It was always the very ANTITHESIS of individual liberty. States rights meant the right of provinces to have the absolute tyranny of the majority over the bodies and lives of the minority. It was a very ugly argument that was originally built up to titanic size to protect one particular American institution, slavery.
Once slavery fell, in 1865, states rights were reconstituted for another full century PRIMARILY around the idea that states still had the right to HOLD DOWN unpopular minorities, even if they couldn't outright enslave them.
Once again, states rights were always DIRECTLY OPPOSED to the personal liberty of millions of American individuals. States Rights for the first 190 years of American history was about the supposed "right" of some to keep racial minorities, particularly blacks, in subjection. States rights were brutally opposed to personal liberty at every step of the way. They were ABOUT slavery and segregation, from the beginning, and right through the 1970s at least.
That's what those words have come to mean in American history. States rights = the right of states to allow the enslavement of some of their citizens, and the right of states to oppress some of their citizens based on a localized tyranny of the majority.
The Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement both established that there are no such states rights, not in America. To the extent they existed in the first place, and they did, they were a horrible mistake, a nearly fatal birth defect of the American Constitution. That they persisted merely showed how ugly and evil and obsessively racist many Americans were.
So TODAY what's the argument for "states rights" that, since 1980, makes it a LIBERTARIAN argument? Libertarianism doesn't mean anything good if it allows that states can enslave some people and segregate others.
And that's what states' rights meant until at least 1974.
So, what do they mean since then that puts states rights at the HEART of libertarianism?
Or is the concept that SLAVERY and SEGREGATION are somehow ACCEPTABLE if folks in states want them at the heart of libertarianism?
If so, that's not libertarian at all. It makes a mockery of the word.
Explain your way outta that one, RudyBots.
***Still crickets.
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