Posted on 03/17/2012 4:12:31 AM PDT by BroJoeK
I present fact.
You want to twist to conform to your thinking.
Now that you have made all of those fine points, it is clear that you in no way understand Mr. Calhoun.
He was recognized by everyone in his time as being an outspoken, ardent supporter of the Constitution as well as states’ rights.
Nothing in your commentary would indicate that you have either read or absorbed anything that relates to that common understanding of his statesmanship.
But, that is your shortcoming, to which you are welcome to cling. So be it.
Not to be any more contentious than you are being, I suppose the same thing could be said of the US Constitution which seemed to be opposed to granting liberty to the women and Indians of their population.
So you can see that many minority populations were being marginalized by majorities....just the argument that Calhoun was making in the 1848 speech.
He was arguing for either political responsibility or constraints via law to protect against loss of rights.
Interpret that as you will.
It is clear that you certainly do not know.
Instead of interrupting, why don't you just read for yourself. And you can drop the straw man accusations and self serving, pretentious threats...they only verify your irrelevance.
Of course Calhoun wanted to protect the rights of his own group. It would be strange if he didn't.
But other minority groups that wanted protection for their own liberty would have to fight for it in the teeth of Calhoun's opposition.
The "concurrent majority" wasn't going to protect those who were already enslaved, and it would work to keep them enslaved.
The simple truth is that, in order to argue in favor of the rebellion, they must support its foundation and “ideals” - its raison d’être. And the confederacy’s reason for being was to defend, perpetuate, and expand the role of slavery - both in North America and elsewhere.
The neo-confederates play at hair-splitting, moral relativity, cognitive dissonance, and outright duplicity when they support the Lost Cause. At least some are willing to be candid about it.
You’re right - adding the (sic) is petty and annoying. I know, I’ve done it myself on occasion ;-). And you’re also correct in your original spelling. It was PeaRidge who altered your quote and then marked it.
PeaRidge, you owe X an apology.
The constitution only added the word “male” with the 14th amendment. Before then who could vote was up to the states. Indians were full citizens or not, depending on their tax status. The Rolf family, descended from Pocahontas, had long been important in Virginia. Assimilated Indians voted. Why would they not?
The constitution only added the word “male” with the 14th amendment. Before then who could vote was up to the states. Indians were full citizens or not, depending on their tax status. The Rolf family, descended from Pocahontas, had long been important in Virginia. Assimilated Indians voted. Why would they not?
Calhoun was all about protecting the rights of the minority of South Carolina (white slave owners) at the expense of the majority (slaves), by putting the slave owners in command of the local militia, thus enslaving poor whites to support the rich.
I hold that John Brown was unjustly convicted. He had never taken a oath of loyalty to Virginia, and thus should not have been convicted of treason to Virginia.
He could have been convicted of murdering a black man, but convicting a white man for the murder of a black man wouldn’t have suited the slave power.
He writes the second worst tariff in American history, then complains when it's passed---called on his infantile bluff.
He advocates the Labor Theory of Value, which you are apparently utterly incapable of grasping, but which Owen, Marx, and Lenin all embraced as THE essential element of socialism and communism. Calhoun NEVER backed off of this---and thoroughly was supported by Fitzhugh.
Yeah, I've read ABSORBED, AND REJECTED this pre-Marxist Marxist destroyer of free speech. How about you?
Kerry had fine reasons too for explaining away an inconvenient fact.
“Improper meddling,” such as the barring of any anti-slave commentary, publications, or public speech so that, as he said, the south could hold its slaves “in peace?”
Further, I keep repeating, and you neo-confederates keep dodging, Calhoun's ECOMOMIC theory, no matter what else he pretended to advocate, was based entirely on the "lavor theory of value. I'm not concerned with his "class struggle"(although that was there). That is not the essence of his thought, nor, as you all keep dodging, his perfect agreement with another pre-Marxist Marxist slave-owner George Fitzhugh. ALL Marxism relies on the "labor theory of value" and it is entirely, utterly, and totally incompatible with the market theory of value.
I noticed your fixation on the labor theory of value. The labor theory of value isn’t something invented by Marx, and moreover Calhoun was 40 years older than Marx and was writing his own ideas when Marx was in diapers.
Considering that David Ricardo and Ben Franklin also held to variants of the labor theory of value, they’d be Marxists as well applying your theory. They weren’t, of course, and neither was Calhoun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value#The_birth_of_the_LTV
Early insights in the labor theory of value appear in Aristotle´s Politics. He developed a “theory of the value of labor”, holding that the value of labor skills is given by the goods they command in the market.
St. Thomas Aquinas, based on Aristotle’s theories, produced early labor values theories. Some writers (including Bertrand Russell and Karl Marx) think the labor theory of value can be traced back to him.
Benjamin Franklin in his 1729 essay entitled “A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency” is sometimes credited (including by Karl Marx) with originating the concept in its modern form. However, the theory has been traced back to Treatise of Taxes, written in 1662 by Sir William Petty and to John Locke’s notion, set out in the Second Treatise on Government, that property derives from labor through the act of “mixing” one’s labor with items in the common store of goods, though this has alternatively been seen as a labor theory of property.
Scottish economist Adam Smith accepted the LTV for pre-capitalist societies but saw a flaw in its application to capitalism. He pointed out that if the “labor embodied” in a product equalled the “labor commanded” (i.e. the amount of labor that could be purchased by selling it), then profit was impossible. David Ricardo (seconded by Marx) responded to this paradox by arguing that Smith had confused labor with wages. “Labor commanded”, he argued, would always be more than the labor needed to sustain itself (wages). The value of labor, in this view, covered not just the value of wages (what Marx called the value of labor power), but the value of the entire product created by labor.
Ricardo’s theory was a predecessor of the modern theory that equilibrium prices are determined solely by production costs associated with “neo-Ricardianism”.
Classical economist David Ricardo’s labor theory of value holds that the value of a good (how much of another good or service it exchanges for in the market) is proportional to how much labor was required to produce it, including the labor required to produce the raw materials and machinery used in the process. David Ricardo stated it as, “The value of a commodity, or the quantity of any other commodity for which it will exchange, depends on the relative quantity of labour which is necessary for its production, and not as the greater or less compensation which is paid for that labour” (Ricardo 1817).
But your little smokescreen away from the fact that Calhoun BEHAVED exactly like a Marxist won't work. He wanted to shut down all discussion of slavery, not merely "protect it" where it existed; and he, like Fitzhugh (whom you also dodge) loved the communistic aspects of have a class that "took care" of "inferior" peoples.
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