My topic today, and this is the last direct topic that has anything to do with Lincoln or the war to prevent southern independence, as I call it, is the classical liberal states' rights tradition, and the phrase states' rights is sometimes used synonymously with federalism, decentralized governments, basically it means essentially the same thing.
And a lot of people have a misconception of what it is because the whole study of states' rights philosophically and in political science literature has been pretty much ignored for a long, long time, if not ignored, misrepresented.
Some people have asked me questions in light of my Lincoln writings.
They'll say things like, well, the South, or the Confederate government,
or somebody in the South will mention some prominent politician.
He voted in favor of some federal law, and they'll name some federal law.
And they'll say, how can you square that with his support of states' rights?
And the answer is easy.
The so-called states' rights had nothing to do with opposition to all federal law.
I think of the original, one of the most famous originators of this idea of states' rights as being Thomas Jefferson.
You know, long before Lincoln or Jefferson Davis or any of these people came onto the scene, it was Jefferson.
And the basic idea, which was also shared by Madison as a young man, was that the citizens of the states ought to have the sovereignty invested in them, sovereignty over government invested in them.
and that they ought to have some vehicle, if they're going to have a central government, they have to have some vehicle for deciding whether or not what the central government is doing is legitimate or not, is constitutional or not.
It doesn't mean there should be no federal legislation or you're totally opposed to having a federal government.
It never meant that in the eyes of Jefferson, Madison or anywhere else.
In fact, the way Madison described it was dual sovereignty.
He used the phrase dual sovereignty and what he meant was that the original system of government
set up by the American founders, well, they delegated certain powers to the central government
and in theory, the whole purpose of government was supposed to be to protect the lives, liberties
and Properties of the People, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness is the way they set it.
And sometimes that would involve protecting the citizens from state and local tyrannies.
But where the duality comes in is the lion's share of governmental authority, if you will,
governmental functions was to be left at the state and local levels because they always
I always understood that the biggest threat to freedom, the wolf at the door, as I put it recently, would be the central government.
That would always be the big threat to freedom. Petty local tyrannies are bad enough, but you always have an exit.
You don't have to live in a particular town, city, state. You have options.
But with the central government, the options are much more scarce. You have to leave the entire country.
And so the real threat to tyranny would always come mostly from the central government.
And so the 10th Amendment, for example, gives everything that is not the responsibility of the central government is left up to the citizens and the states respectively.
And that is how they were to control what the central government did.
It's called dual sovereignty, another word for states' rights.
Now, of course, since the 1860s, this has been pretty much ignored, associated with
racism or slavery, which is a sort of a rhetorical gimmick that's used because, of course, certainly
in Jefferson's day, it had nothing to do with that at all.
And so that's the topic for today, the truth about states' rights.
And I might as well, this handout that I gave you, this is section one of the Kentucky Resolve
of 1798.
And what this is was when the Adams Administration, John Adams Administration passed, with the
Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, it made it literally illegal to criticize
the government.
It was illegal.
You could be thrown in prison for criticizing the Adams Administration and the law applied
applied to the vice president, who was Thomas Jefferson at the time, didn't apply to, and
there were prosecutions, but the only people ever prosecuted under the Sedition Act were
members of Jefferson's political party, nobody who was a member of the opposing party or
any other party was ever prosecuted under this.
And it literally did make it illegal to criticize the government, so it was a censorship law.
And so, you know, here's this relatively new central government making criticism of the
government illegal.
You know, what could be more illiberal than that?
And of course, people like Jefferson were tremendously alarmed at this.
And so what Jefferson did was he authored this Kentucky Resolve, which is much longer
than this.
This is just the first section.
And he did it anonymously at first, but then later on he admitted that he was the author.
James Madison authored something that is almost identical to this, called the Virginia Resolution
of 1798.
You can read it as well as I can, but this was a response to the Sedition Act, which
made it illegal to criticize the central government.
It resolved that the several states composed of the United States of America are not united
on the principles of unlimited submission to their general government.
How about that?
by that compact, under the style and title of a constitution for the United States and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes, delegated to that government certain dividend powers, reserving each state to itself the residuary mass of right to their own self-government, and that whenever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void and of no force. And so this is the best statement I know of.
of what states' rights meant to people like Jefferson and Madison and other people at the time.
It didn't mean opposition to all federal law, it didn't mean defense of slavery and so forth.
You see, the advocates of unlimited centralized governmental power have used this language of
racist defense of slavery to demean and denigrate the idea that the citizens can have some control
They don't want the citizens to have control over their central government, and so therefore they have done this for generations.
They have propagandized against this, and they've been so effective in doing this that it was a hundred years before a book would be written on this.
Reclaiming the American Revolution by William J. Watkins
creeping out of the the dustbin of history here. And one of the points I'd
like to make about this is that this understanding of the Federal Compact,
this understanding, was understood by citizens north and south. This was not,
since it came from Jefferson and Madison, it was not just a Virginia thing or
southern states rights thing. It was north and south. For example, when
When Jefferson became president, the British started confiscating American ships.
They were at war with France and they started conscripting sailors for their Navy and stealing
American ships.
Jefferson didn't know what to do about it other than to impose a trade embargo prohibiting
ships from engaging in the transatlantic trade.
And this was horribly harmful to the New England economy, which was very much trade dependent.
And so the New Englanders responded to this by using Jefferson's own language from the
Kentucky resolve to say that we are not going to abide by the trademark, we are going to
continue trading with the Europeans and take our chances out there.
And so both houses of the Massachusetts legislature issued formal denunciations of this trade
embargo, denouncing it, they called it, quote, unjust, oppressive and unconstitutional.
While this state maintains its sovereignty and independence, there's that sovereignty
and independence again, they didn't say anything about the whole people, imagine that.
All the citizens can find protection against outrage and injustice in the strong arm of
of State Government, and they said the embargo was, quote, was not legally binding on the
citizens of the state of Massachusetts. So they nullified it, just like the South Carolinians
issued this statement that nullified the tariff of abominations, which I talked about yesterday.
This was long before that. The South Carolinians were doing what people in Massachusetts did
The State of Connecticut said that this embargo law is, quote, incompatible with the Constitution of the United States and encroaches upon the immunities of the state.
And then its legislature directed all state government officials, quote, to deny any official aid or cooperation in the execution of the act.
The Act aforesaid Rhode Island issued a similar proclamation. Then when the War of 1812 broke out, the same New England Federalists, the Federalist Party, they considered this to be mostly a dispute between Jefferson's party and the British.
That's what they said anyway. And they did everything they could to disassociate themselves from the war and to not participate in the War of 1812.
The Connecticut State Assembly said this, paraphrasing this Kentucky resolve once again, they said,
but it must not be forgotten that the state of Connecticut is a free, sovereign, and independent state.
And they spell the words free, sovereign, and independent in big capital letters.
Maybe I'll show you how, I'll pull this off here and show you how it looks.
Right there, my finger is. And that's in the original. I didn't add the big capital letters.
That was in the original, Free, Sovereign and Independent State.
And that the United States are a confederated and not a consolidated republic, that's totally
the opposite of the Lincoln theory of the Gettysburg Address.
The governor of this state is under a high and solemn obligation to maintain the lawful
rights and privileges thereof as a sovereign, free and independent state, as he is to support
of the Constitution of the United States.
And the obligation to support the latter
imposes an additional obligation to support the former.
And the building cannot stand if the pillars
upon which it rests are impaired or destroyed.
So they were saying that the rights of the states
are the pillars of American liberty, and that comes first.
You can't have liberty protected by the US Constitution
unless you also have the other, the dual sovereignty.
That was their expression of Madison's dual sovereignty,
I think.
And so, it was north and south, it was northern states as well as southern states that adopted and embraced this doctrine of states' rights and had nothing to do with slavery, racism or anything like that.
The New England Federalists were so outraged with Jefferson, they so disliked Jefferson, they compared him to the devil, and the New England ministers did, and worse, that they plotted to secede.
There was a New England secession movement that lasted for about 10 years that ended up in a secession convention in Hartford, Connecticut in 1814.
And they voted against secession, but there was never any question of whether secession was legal or not.
The only debate was over, is this a wise thing politically and economically for us to secede from the United States?
of States, but there was never any question over the right of secession, and it was led
by Senator Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, who was George Washington's adjutant general
during the American Revolution. He also served as George Washington's secretary of war and
secretary of state, and he was also the secretary of state in the John Adams administration.
So this was not some crackpot. He may have been a crackpot, he was a politician after
for All, but he held some pretty high-level jobs, and he was the leader of the New England
secession movement, and it has to be one of the reasons why the Southern Confederates
thought, well, naturally, this is a right that all states have. The New Englanders, you
know, who are now criticizing us assume they have that right. Why don't we have that right?
Another example of the use of this state's rights logic was when Andrew Jackson had a
a big dispute with the Bank of the United States in the late 1820s. He wanted to defund this. He
didn't trust a central bank run by politicians in the nation's capital, and he eventually won that
debate. But the states played a very important part in that, and I alluded to that briefly yesterday.
When the Bank of the United States opened up two branches in Ohio,
The State of Ohio imposed a tax of $50,000 a year per branch to try to tax the Bank of the United States out of its borders, to bankrupt it and get out of there.
It also issued resolutions that were kind of similar to these resolutions from Connecticut and Massachusetts regarding the embargo in the early 1800s.
The Ohio Legislature said this, the states have an equal right to interpret the Constitution for themselves, and then after that they withdrew the protection and aid of the laws of the state from the bank.
And that's kind of scary if you're a banker, the state legislature is saying we're withdrawing the protection of the laws of our state from your bank, that's sort of inviting bank robbers right in.
Indiana and Illinois did the same thing to try to kick the Bank of the United States out as did Maryland and other states.
There's a real interesting story in the book by James Kilpatrick that I mentioned this morning called The Sovereign States.
He tells this whole story in great detail of the confrontation between the State of Ohio and the Bank of the United States
and how the state of Ohio invoked the states' rights doctrine, the Jeffersonian states' rights doctrine
to make its case against this bank, which it did not want to exist.
And the story he tells is sort of an amusing part of it, I'll read you the amusing part, I think it's amusing anyway.
Here's what the state of Ohio did.
On the morning of September 17th, a man named John L. Harper was sent to collect the taxes at the Bank of the United States,
to the United States, which was a precursor to the Fed.
Harper made one last request for voluntary payment.
When this was denied, he leaped over the counter,
strode into the bank vaults,
and helped himself to $100,000 in paper and specie.
He then turned this over to a deputy,
stuffing this considerable hoard into a small trunk,
which the party thoughtfully had come equipped.
The trunk, and they put $100,000 in a trunk.
So they were serious about getting rid of the Bank of the United States, and which they eventually did.
Andrew Jackson did succeed, but he had a great deal of help from the citizens of the states invoking the Jeffersonian Kentucky Resolve Doctrine.
Some northern states also invoked this nullification idea to drag their feet or to not enforce the Fugitive Slave Act,
a law that Lincoln supported very strongly, and the Fugitive Slave Act, there were several
of them that were passed over the decades, but the Fugitive Slave Act, the last one was
passed in 1850, it essentially conscripted citizens of northern states to capture runaway
slaves and return them to their owners.
That's why the famous Underground Railroad ended up in Canada.
If you escaped from Mississippi and ended up in Pennsylvania, you had a federal bounty
on your head, and the magistrates in the northern states were paid $10 for deciding that a captured
slave should be brought back to his owner.
They were paid $5 if they decided he should be set free.
So again, there's that understanding of economic incentives that was put in there.
And so, and some of the northern states were not enforcing this and they invoked the Jeffersonian
dictum of nullification because they were saying we think this is unconstitutional therefore
we're not going to enforce this.
And I mentioned earlier that Lincoln supported the Fugitive Slave Act, they were not enforcing,
and in the early days of his administration he instructed William Seward to get a new
New law passed through Congress that would nullify these New England nullifiers, that
would make it a federal law against nullifying the Fugitive Slave Act, complete with criminal
penalties involved for anybody who attempted to not enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.
So this was widely accepted north and south.
That's the first point I wanted to make about this.
It was not just a Southern thing, and it kind of infuriates me when I read people like Harry Jaffe, who I mentioned earlier, saying, making statements that this idea was invented out of thin air by John C. Calhoun as a defense of slavery, that it is simply an insidious lie. It's just not true by any stretch of the imagination. It came long before that.
So that's point number one about what states' rights is and how it was widely accepted everywhere. Point number two is that I'd like to make this afternoon is why it is that so many conservatives especially and some libertarians are really sort of acting in a sort of a like Don Quixote when they wave the Constitution around and pledge their allegiance to the Constitution
and they're constantly telling us this should be looked at as a sacred document and if only the government would enforce this constitution, we would all live as free citizens and so on and so forth.
The Cato Institute publishes a little pocket-sized version of the constitution. Everyone here has probably received one. They have mass mailing. They mail them to everybody all the time.
The underlying assumption seems to be that, well, if enough people read the actual Constitution,
that they will somehow pressure our politicians to enforce the Constitution.
And that would mean eliminating at least 95% of the federal government today, I would think,
if they actually did live by the Constitution.
But how is that supposed to happen?
How is this supposed to be enforced?
How on earth is this constituted?
The Congress now just ridicules the Constitution.
I gave a talk before Ron Paul's group in Congress.
He has something called the Liberty Caucus,
and he claims to have 20 or 25 members or so,
and about 10 or 12 of them showed up.
And I gave a talk on my Lincoln book.
It's very, very kind of strange to see all these members
of Congress walking around the House Office Building
The Liberty Caucus of 10 or 12 members of the United States Congress
At one point, one of them said, you can no longer make constitutional arguments here in Congress against government programs.
You're not taken seriously at all, and everyone just ignores you.
And they all shook their head, yes, that's true.
and so it's a dead letter it's a they'll use the Constitution if it can be used
some way to expand state power but but they won't use it to limit state power
anyway they just laugh at you and I've seen I was what I can recall flipping
the channels one night when I couldn't sleep and the C-SPAN was there and an
old acquaintance of mine Roger Pilon who works at the Cato Institute was on some
hearing and before the US Senate committee and he was making a
the Constitutional Argument Against Some Government Program
and if I recall right, it was Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama at the time
who just looked at Pilon and said, we have the power to do this and so we're going to do it.
And he was pretty much saying, the hell with the Constitution.
Here's Roger with all his research and his law degrees and his constitutional arguments
and he just said, we have the guns, therefore we're going to do it.
It's sort of similar to people who often ask me questions about my opinion on the legality of the income tax, and my usual response is, it doesn't matter what the legalistic arguments are about whether the income tax is constitutional or not, the government has enough guns with which to enforce income tax collection, therefore, you have to pay the income tax. It doesn't matter what the law says or what the Constitution, how it came about constitutionally, that's sort of a moot issue.
And if you think about it, just think of the political incentives, this idea that the Constitution will be enforced by someone.
How is this going to happen? You have a classic case of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs,
where the people who benefit from bigger and bigger government programs, they all have a very strong interest to lobby for, argue for,
for Bigger Government, because they are the beneficiaries.
Who are the losers?
Well, it's generally the general public,
who have to pay for all this and don't benefit necessarily
from the sugar program and things like that,
sugar price supports, for example.
And it's something that's been known
by political philosophers and now, today,
a public choice economist for hundreds of years,
that when you have a situation under democracy
Special Interest Groups for Bigger and Bigger Governments
and nationwide political coalitions, for example, to oppose the sugar price support program.
It's just not going to happen.
And so this is true of the Constitution in general.
There's a built-in, what we call a public choice problem here, in that it can't be self-enforcing.
And the founding fathers were not so stupid as to think a mere piece of paper would be self-enforcing.
How did they think it would be enforced?
Well, the idea was that most of the governmental functions would be in the hands of the citizens
and the states respectively.
The citizens of the states were to be the ones who were to enforce this constitution
because after all, the citizens of the states were sovereign.
The central government was created as their agent to be their servant.
That government was supposed to be the servant, not the master of the people like it is today.
And so that's how the Constitution was supposed to be enforced, by the citizens of the respective sovereign states.
A political scientist at Johns Hopkins named Gottfried Dietze wrote a great little book called America's Political Dilemma.
And that's spelled D-I-E-T-Z-E, Gottfried Dietze.
In America's Political Dilemma, he explains this, he says,
Federalism instituted to enable the federal government to check oppressions by the governments of the states, and vice versa, and vice versa, appears to be a supreme principle of the Constitution.
So that's his very brief statement of what I've been talking about recently, divided sovereignty.
He goes on to say this, he says, before the Civil War, the nature of American federalism was still a subject of debate.
The outcome of the Civil War ended that debate. The nationalists emerged as victors. National power increased as the 20th century approached, along with the disappearance of states' rights.
That period was subsequently characterized by an increasing interference with economic freedom and constitutes a constitutional revolution that can well be termed a reversal of the revolution of 1787.
So what Mises is saying is that the revolution of 1787, the American Revolution, was a states' rights revolution.
The system of government set up was a compact of the states where the citizens of the states were sovereign.
The Civil War, so-called, was a revolution against that revolution because it did destroy that system.
That's why in my writings, I argue every chance I get, that Lincoln's War destroyed the Union.
Union, it didn't save the Union, it destroyed the voluntary Union of the Founding Fathers
and it destroyed federalism and states' rights at the same time.
It saved the Union geographically, but philosophically it destroyed the Union.
And you have big government advocates and imperialists who weaseled their way into the
government, top levels of government, after the turn of the century, who have actually
We praise this outcome publicly. Woodrow Wilson is one example. Before Wilson was president,
he was a political science professor at Princeton, and he wrote a book called Congressional Government.
He wrote another book called Constitutional Government in the United States. And here's
what Woodrow Wilson said about this. He said, and he's writing this in an approving tone
of voice. He said, the war between the states established this principle that the federal
The central government is, through its courts, the final judge of its own powers."
So it was no longer the citizens of the states who would be the judges of the appropriate
powers of the central government.
It was the central government itself, through its courts, that would decide the limits of
its own powers.
And as I alluded to earlier, most of the founders thought that this would be a disaster, an
absolute disaster.
This is a classic case of the thoughts regarding the Hanals.
After Jefferson died, probably the most prominent proponent of this view was John C. Calhoun,
and the book that I mentioned to you yesterday, a good one to pick up is called Union and
Liberty.
The editor is Ross Lentz, L-E-N-C-E, and it contains his book, actually, The Disquisition
on Government.
So if you want to read a good rendition of this Jeffersonian states' rights philosophy,
that's where to read it from.
And I'd like to share with you just one thing he says, one of his main arguments.
Murray Rothbard always said that he thought Calhoun was one of America's most brilliant
political philosophers.
And he is hopelessly trashed and denigrated by the Lincoln cult, especially Jaffa and
the Claremont people and the Straussians.
They just despise Calhoun.
They make up lies about him all the time in their writings.
I don't know where they get some of this stuff.
But he has no redeeming value at all in their eyes.
And here's one of the things that Calhoun said about the nature of democracy.
He's talking about, he broke, he said under democracy you're going to have two groups
In society, you can have one group that are the net taxpayers, people who pay a lot more or pay more than they get back from government,
and the other group is net tax consumers, who get more from government benefits than they pay in tax.
And he predicted that it is inevitable, it's like one of the iron laws of politics, that the group of net tax consumers will dominate taxpayers,
The People Who Defend the Constitution and Limit It Government
in the Contest be regarded as mere abstractionists and indeed deservedly if they should indulge
in the folly of supposing that the party of possession of the ballot box and the physical
force of the country could be successfully resisted by an appeal to reason, truth, justice
or the obligations imposed by the Constitution.
The end of the contest would be the subversion of the Constitution and that has sure come
true as has it.
This was around 1850. Calhoun died in 1850. If you want a good, the legal view of the
Jeffersonian Constitution, it's a book called View of the Constitution of the United States
by St. George Tucker. And it's been recently reprinted so you can buy it pretty cheaply
in paperback online at Amazon or in other places. And this was the Jeffersonian view
of the Constitution, very popular. Who was St. George Tucker? He was a professor of law
at William and Mary College. He took the place of Thomas Jefferson's teacher, George Wythe,
who we have a student here who goes to Wythe College. He pronounces it Wythe, but it's spelled
Wythe. There's an E on the end, W-Y-T-H-E, so I'm going to stick with Wythe. I want everybody
at your college who calls it Wythe. He was a signer of the Declaration of Independence,
St. George Tucker fought in the American Revolution, wounded in battle, became a successful lawyer.
He adopted John Randolph of Roanoke, his mother was widowed and he adopted John Randolph.
He authored a plan for the abolition of slavery in Virginia in 1796, which was one of the
first plans offered anywhere in America for the abolition of slavery.
And in his book, St. George Tucker said this, he said, the union of the sovereignty of a
state with the central government constitutes a state of usurpation and absolute tyranny
over the people.
He was saying, if you have a union of sovereignty with the central government, meaning if you
allow the central government to decide for itself what the limits of its power are to
be, well then you're going to have tyranny, that's what's going to happen.
You have to have the citizens in control with some mechanism, some practical mechanism and
the one they were talking about was states' rights.
And he went on to say, if the unlimited authority of the central state were to change the constitution
itself, the government, whatever be its form, is absolute and despotic.
And he believed also that, I'm still quoting, the doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary
power and oppression is absurd, slavish, and destructive to the good and happiness of mankind.
and so and that's all I'm going to read from that I don't want to read the whole book to you here it's a sure recipe for putting everyone to sleep but but I recommend it to you it's the Jeffersonian states rights version of the Constitution but of course this is another one of those things that has been forgotten since 1865 for the most part and most Americans have been taught the New England version of American history they haven't been taught the real version they've been taught that the winner is always
The History After Wars. A contemporary of Tucker's was a United States Senator from Virginia named John Taylor
who wrote a book called Tyranny Unmasked that I mentioned yesterday and a few things he said
about this topic in there. He said, being an essential principle for preserving liberty,
the Constitution never could have designed to destroy it, to destroy liberty, by investing five
Five or six men installed for life with the power of regulating the constitutional rights
of all political departments."
So what he was saying is he thought it would have been an absurdity for the founders to
think that, like I said yesterday, five or six government lawyers with lifetime tenure
putting the power to defend everyone's liberty in their hands and their hands alone, a Supreme
Court.
That was craziness.
So that was the states' rights thing, and that's what states' rights was always about.
It was a mechanism for the citizens themselves to control their central government.
Now a hardcore anarcho-capitalist could argue, well, this whole history now, this whole period
shows that a limited government is impossible.
You could use the whole American experience to say, well, this was the best attempt to
have limited government and despite the best of intentions that it sure didn't work, it kind of
worked until 1865 but then it was destroyed at gunpoint. In my view, as soon as the central
government became powerful enough to destroy, rule by the citizens themselves, it did so, it did so
by force of arms. There used to be a lot of conservative and libertarian writers and thinkers
who wrote quite a lot about this because they understood this truth.
Not so many anymore. A lot of libertarians, like our friends at the Cato Institute, I think are afraid of being branded as politically incorrect
because they never mentioned this at all. They're more concerned with being acceptable to the Washington establishment and to academe
than to speaking the truth about history, about this. But that wasn't always true.
Back in the older days, Frank Chataroff, one of the famous old right icons, wrote this great little book, The Income Tax Route of All Evil.
He addressed this whole issue of how to suppress tyranny.
And he said this, the real obstacle to tyranny is the psychological resistance to centralization that the state's rights tradition fosters.
The citizen of divided allegiance cannot be reduced to subservience.
If he is in a habit of serving two political gods, he cannot be dominated by either one.
And he spells gods with a small g.
No political authority ever achieved absolutism until the people were deprived of a choice of loyalties.
And he goes on to say that it was not by accident that Stalin, Mussolini and Lenin liquidated any and all competing authorities before consolidating their power,
including the church and everything else, not just state governments.
He mentioned Charterov writes about divided authority. He calls Madison's divided sovereignty
divided authority. He says, this was nothing less than the bulwark of freedom, for freedom means
the absence of restraints, and government cannot give freedom, it can only take it away. The more
power the government exercises, the less freedom the people will enjoy, and when the government
The government has a monopoly of power, the people have no freedom.
That is the definition, the very definition of absolutism, monopoly of power.
And so, Choterov wrote kindly about states' rights.
The second person I'll mention is Ludwig von Mises.
In his book, Omnipotent Government, which is for sale right outside his door, I'm sure,
He was talking in one passage about developments in America and Switzerland,
in this one particular passage I'm going to quote,
and about how the growth of government had been occurring in these two countries.
And he says, new powers accrued not to the member states, but to the federal government.
And federal here meaning central government.
Every step toward more government interference and toward more planning means at the same time
and expansion of the jurisdiction of the central government.
Washington and Bern, Bern the capital, Switzerland, were once the seats of federal governments.
Today they are capitals in the true sense of the word and the states and cantons are virtually reduced to the status of provinces.
And here's a part that I italicize where von Mises said,
It is a very significant fact that the adversaries of the trend toward more government control
describe their opposition as a fight against Washington and a fight against Bern, i.e.
against centralization.
It is conceived as a contest of states' rights versus the central power."
So to Ludwig von Mises, the whole contest over liberty and freedom was based on opposition
to the central government, to the national, what's going on in the national capital, and
versus states' rights.
And keep in mind, it didn't mean that there's something called a state that has rights.
I've had some Randians in particular annoy the hell out of me with it.
Only people have rights, states don't have, you know, my response is usually a duh to
that.
The meaning of states' rights was individuals have a right to collectively band together
to Oppose Tyranny at the Central Level of Government.
That's what states write.
It doesn't mean there's something called a state of Alabama that has rights.
It doesn't mean that.
Never did mean that.
Jefferson never thought that's what it meant.
Madison never thought, nobody ever thought that.
Only the Randians seem to think that because they keep emailing me in these indignant tones
of their letters as though they've discovered some brilliant point out there.
Writing them back has no effect.
I keep saying the same thing over and over again, but Murray Rothbard, a young Murray Rothbard in his early 20s, wrote a letter to Strom Thurmond, the late Strom Thurmond, who ran for president in 1948 on the state's rights party ticket.
And he wrote this letter, Murray said, although a New Yorker born and bred, I was a staunch supporter of the Strom-Thurman movement in 1948.
He said, but the problem with the movement was that it focused too excessively on the civil tyranny program.
Murray called the civil rights legislation the civil tyranny legislation because it violated property rights.
And Murray, like a lot of other people, thought that the purpose of this was not justice for minorities, but federal control and federal expansion of the bureaucracy.
And so Murray went on to say that this program of federal civil rights should be opposed as an affront to property rights and the freedom of association.
And what was really needed was a national as opposed to a regional party to fight, quote, the power hungry Washington bureaucracy.
So that was his view. And of course there have always been the proponents of centralized power.
We wouldn't have all the centralized power that we have today without some very influential
proponents. And so I want to read a typical argument from a political writer who wrote
during the same time that von Mises was writing Omnipotent Government, around the same time.
This was a contemporary of von Mises in Europe at the time, who was making the opposite case.
He was making a case for a consolidated government. And I'll read you a few things.
He started out by condemning the impotence and fragmentation of the, he was referring to Germany
here, of provinces. And he referred to the, quote, struggle between federalism and centralization.
So this proponent of centralized governmental power understood, like Mises did, that the biggest opposition to monopoly government power was federalism and states' rights, although he was on the other side.
This writer naturally turned to Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address to make his case for the elimination of state rights in Germany.
He said this,
The individual states of the American Union could not have possessed any state sovereignty
of their own, for it was not these states that formed the Union.
On the contrary, it was the Union which formed a great part of the so-called states."
That was one of Lincoln's theories that the states did not form the Union, the Union formed
the states.
So the Union was older than the states, he argued, therefore the states were never sovereign.
And if you just think about that logically, it's the same as saying a marriage can be
A marriage cannot be older than either spouse, because a marriage is a union, and how could
a marital union be older than either spouse?
It's a logical impossibility.
The union of two things cannot be older than either of the two things.
That was Lincoln's theory, and I might as well put it on the screen here from the horse's
mouth.
This is from, it might be a little too small for you to read, but this is from Lincoln's
first inaugural address where he made the argument that the Union is older than the
Therefore, no such thing as state sovereignty ever existed.
He said, the Union is much older than the Constitution.
It was formed by the Articles of Association.
It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence.
It was further matured by the Articles of Confederation.
And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects
for the Constitution was to form a more perfect Union.
And so this German political writer was paraphrasing that.
That's exactly what he was paraphrasing.
and making his case for abolishing states' rights in Germany.
A few other things that this writer said was that it would be desirable for Germany to
quote, eliminate states' rights altogether, since for us the state as such is only a form
but the essential is its content, the nation, the people, the whole people, or is that whole
people argument.
It is clear that everything else must be subordinated to its sovereign interests,
its meaning the national government. In particular, we cannot grant to any individual state within
a nation and the state representing it state sovereignty and sovereignty and point of political
power. Then he goes on to say the mischief of individual federated states must cease
and will someday cease. Okay, let's see, I don't know though. I guess that's about all I'll read
from that. Okay well any idea who I might be talking about? I've been quoting from
Mein Kampf. This was all Adolf Hitler saying these things, even the quoting
quoting Lincoln's first inaugural address. There was a section in Mein Kampf
about the state sovereignty that I've been reading from. If anybody wants the
footnotes I'd be glad to give them to you at some point. You know I got onto
of this, because during my debate with Harry Jaffa, I knew he would do this, but because
I, he did this when he debated Mel Bradford and other people by insinuating with sort
of some weasel word language that you're a Nazi. If you oppose my view of Lincoln, you're
a Nazi. And so, but the sort of the weasely way he does it is, the way he did it, it's
in his latest book, and he pulled this on me during our debate, there was a former Nazi
A Nazi named Rauschning, who supposedly said that Hitler once said that it was a shame
that the South lost the American Civil War because they had the right idea about race
relations.
So here's a former Nazi who's not the most reliable person, supposedly quoting Adolf
Hitler himself, and this is in the front of chapter three of Japan's latest book, this
sort of thing.
And then he'll say, well, therefore, Di Lorenzo must agree with Adolf Hitler.
How's that for a brilliant act of logic?
So he pulled this BS on me.
I knew he would, because he does this with everybody, he calls you Nazi or something
like that.
And so, but it just so happened that I remembered that as an undergraduate I had read Mein Kampf
in a history class, a European history class, and I remember there was a section there on
and State Sovereignty.
So the next day, I wrote this article on lewrockwell.com
entitled Harry Jaffa's Hitlerian Defense of Lincoln.
And I put all this in there.
I proved that it was really Adolf Hitler
who agreed with Lincoln and Jaffa
on the whole issue of states' rights.
They're the ones, they're the nationalists
and the centralizers, not me.
I'm opposed to all this stuff.
And so if anybody is a Hitlerite, it's these guys.
So that's the sort of sleazy, dishonest type of argumentation you get from these certain
characters like this.
Anyway, so the point of all this, the second part of my talk here, is that through the
intellectual history of this, is that there have been a lot of libertarians over the years
who have understood this, that divided sovereignty is necessary.
If you're gonna have government,
you need to have divided sovereignty.
There's only any hope of preserving
some semblance of freedom.
And so if not, you're gonna have centralized tyranny
like we have today, and we're all essentially slaves
to the IRS for the most part today,
and that's what we've got.
And so maybe I'll stop there.
That's about all I wanted to say
about what states' rights is
and the classical liberal states' rights tradition.
And oh yeah, I guess since I have trouble
I will mention, since I mentioned that Karl Marx congratulated Abraham Lincoln for his re-election, I have to also mention that the great historian of liberty, Lord Acton, corresponded with Robert E. Lee all during the war, and after the war, and after the war he wrote Robert E. Lee saying that he considered the struggle for states' rights and the war of secession to be the struggle for everyone's liberty, not just Southern
of the Southern Confederacy.
Lord Acton was a prominent member of the intelligentsia of England at the time, an advisor to the
chancellor and so forth.
And he said that he saw in states' rights the redemption of all of our liberty, not
just the Southern Confederacy.
And he went on to say that he was as depressed and disappointed over Appomattox as he was
elated over the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo, where Napoleon was defeated.
And so that's a pretty strong language from the acknowledged greatest historian of liberty
of his time.
And on the other hand, you had old Karl Marx congratulating Abe Lincoln on his books.
I'd like to point out that difference, but that's all I'm going to say for now, and I'll
welcome questions or comments about any of this, if anybody has any.
Commentaries are okay as long as they're short. It's the afternoon. Nobody has
anything? Well, I'm just, you know, I get paid by the hour here, so I'll just...
and the Constitution.
And who out there is working to advocate for whatever remains of the state's right there?
Or I know in our state, in our Constitution,
the very steel business is very free and intense.
So it's all of us in the Constitution.
I believe that every officer in the State of Missouri,
and there's probably a black flag in other states,
Now I'm not a political strategist, I'm an academic.
I look at it as what people like myself and other people who write for the Mises Institute
We're sort of like the ammunition factory, and then the warriors who are out there can use the ammunition that we provide, if it's useful, to become activists and make the arguments, because there are points in history when something happens, when there's an opportunity for some sort of dramatic change in the government, but you have to be equipped with the ideas to make your case to move in the direction of liberty.
or else during that same period the bad guys can win because they've got their arguments
too.
In recent American history, when Reagan was elected in 1980, I'm not worshipful as Reagan
as a lot of people, a lot of conservatives are, but he was a politician, I don't put
great faith in any politician, but what had happened was the government was screwing things
comes up so badly it did provide a big opportunity to make some real progress to downsize government.
We had 13% inflation and 10% unemployment and 20% mortgage rates and the regulatory
agencies like the Federal Trade Commission was so out of control that even the Democratic
controlled Congress defunded it as a protest because it was just so out of control at the
time.
And so there was sort of a collapse of the bureaucracy.
The bureaucracy had just screwed up so badly that Ronald Reagan was elected in a landslide
and they did do some good things.
With Jimmy Carter's help, they deregulated the airlines.
That was Carter's deal.
They deregulated trucking.
That was his deal.
Carter got the ball rolling on the deregulation of oil prices.
Reagan only finished up on all of this, but this stuff all happened during Carter's deal
Because even though he was a Democrat at the time, the government was so bad that even
a Democrat like Carter thought he could make political hay for himself by getting rid of
some of these regulatory agencies.
But luckily, there was a whole body of ideas about why regulation is a bad idea.
The Chicago School and the Austrian School had been working on these for decades and
decades.
So when the opportunity came, the activists in Washington had these ideas.
That's why the Heritage Foundation was founded, for example, to use these ideas.
They've sort of turned into a tacky, kitschy policy report mill since then.
In the early days, Heritage used to publish things by Milton Friedman and people like
that, but now it's all short reports by congressional staffers for the most part.
They don't really rely on the serious scholars that much anymore.
Cato is different.
those more scholarly work with the Cato Journal and some of their
conferences, but that's the way I see this whole battle is a
division of labor here. You know, I tell my students when I try to explain the law
of comparative advantage, I tell them I'm a horrible economist, but I'm even worse
than everything else, so that's what I do. That's what I do, and we have to
to Divide the Labor Somehow.
And so I don't have any secret advice on how to be an activist.
If there are no other questions or brilliant commentaries,
I guess we'll take a break.
And at 4 o'clock, Judge John Denson will be here.
He's a judge, so if you have any drugs on you, get rid of them.
Thank you very much.