A libertarian look at the fourth of July

What to a Libertarian is the Fourth of July? | Bleeding Heart Libertarians - Matt Zwolinski:

July 4,204 - "Most libertarians have a special place in their heart for the Declaration of Independence. With its ringing endorsement of natural, inalienable rights, its insistence of the right of the people to 'alter or abolish' those governments that trample upon those rights, and the stirring commitment of its signatories to pledge their 'Lives…Fortunes…and Sacred Honor' to defending those rights, the Declaration still stands as a masterfully inspirational document to lovers of liberty all around the world....

"Thomas Jefferson produced in the Declaration a brilliant synthesis, summation, and application of 17th and 18th century natural law theory to the particular situation of the United States, drawing not merely (if most obviously) on the work of John Locke, but also on a variety of lesser-known figures such as Frances Hutcheson, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, and Algernon Sydney....

"The Declaration of Independence is a promise of liberty. But libertarians recognize better than most that it is a frustrated promise.... It was frustrated, of course, right from the start. At the same time that Jefferson was declaring all men to have been endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights, almost 20% of the American population was suffering the most egregious violation of those rights imaginable under the institution of slavery...

"There have been numerous commentaries on the contradictions between the Declaration’s ideals of equal liberty and the monstrosity of American slavery. But none, I think, are so eloquent, or so appropriate to the day, as the words Frederick Douglass delivered on July 4th, 1852, in a speech that has come to be known as 'What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?.... in one of the speech’s most memorable passages, Douglass makes the following impassioned plea:

Fellow-citizens! I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a by word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet, you cling to it, as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes. Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation’s bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destroy it forever!

"Slavery, as Douglass experienced it, is gone. But the promise of the Declaration remains unfulfilled. Our government daily tramples upon our liberty and the liberty of those abroad. The reptile is still coiled. Let us lend our weight to Douglass’ effort and continue to work until it is destroyed forever."

Read more: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2014/07/what-to-a-libertarian-is-the-fourth-of-july/
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Harriet Tubman to appear on U.S. $20 bill

Harriet Tubman From a Libertarian POV - Hit & Run : Reason.com - Nick Gillespie:

April 21, 2016 - "Harriet Tubman (1822-1913) is going to be the new face of the $20 bill. Great choice.... Here are four ways that Tubman isn't just a great choice in general but a great choice from a specifically libertarian perspective.

1. She chose to live free or die and articulated that message for all to understand. 'I had reasoned this out in my mind," she said, recalling the death of her master and the necessity of escape. "There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted, and when the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me.'
2. She exemplified higher-law theory, which holds that laws violating basic human rights are null and void regardless of the repressive superstructures created to legitimate and maintain them, and risked her life freeing about 70 other slaves as the 'Moses' of the Underground Railroad.... At the same time, she didn't advocate violence in the mode of John Brown, whose goal of ending slavery she shared.
3. She believed in armed self-defense, a radical-enough concept for poor whites, let alone renegade blacks. During her Underground Railroad missions, she carried a pistol both for protection against slave-catchers and, reportedly, to keep ambivalent "passengers" in line. To this day, blacks have a strong and yet routinely overlooked belief in the Second Amendment, leading one historian to argue that 'guns made the Civil Rights movement possible.' The desire of relatively powerless minorities to arm themselves can still be heard in pro-Second Amendment remarks made by rappers such as Ice-T.
4. She was a suffragette who, after helping slaves escape and working as a spy and scout for the Union in the Civil War, committed herself to women being allowed to vote and have equality under the law. According to Wikipedia, when Tubman was asked whether she believed women deserved the vote, she replied, 'I suffered enough to believe it.'

"A year ago, when Tubman's name was first floated as a possible figure for a new $20 bill, a number of anti-capitalist commenters observed that Tubman of all people shouldn't be on money because, by their reckoning, slavery is the essence of capitalism. As Damon Root noted at the time, this is not just ahistorical in the extreme, it flies in the face of the explicit thought of leading former slaves.... [T]he abolitionists were extremely clear that slavery violated fundamental rights in a liberal order, one that shouldn't countenance slavery for exactly the same reason it should promote free labor. As Frederick Douglass, who corresponded with and thought extremely highly of Tubman, wrote in a scathing letter to his former owner, 'In leaving you, I took nothing but what belonged to me, and in no way lessened your means for obtaining an honest living.'"

Read more: http://reason.com/blog/2016/04/21/4-ways-harriet-tubman-totally-kicked-ass
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Libertarians and the U.S. Civil War

What Should Libertarians Think About the Civil War? - Philip Magness, Newsweek:

July 18, 2015 - "The current national debate over the display and meaning of the Confederate battle flag has reopened a number of longstanding arguments about the meaning of the American Civil War, including within libertarian and classical liberal circles.... Unfortunately, bad history often accompanies this politicization, and libertarians are by no means immune from this tendency.

"The first and perhaps best known 'libertarian' approach to the Civil War attempts to find sympathy with the defeated Confederacy because of its resistance to the federal government and northern military authority or its professed cause of free trade and political self-determination.

"Some aspects of this position have intuitive appeal that produces sympathy for the Confederate cause: It professes outrage against a Union that is said to have conquered by force, trampled on the rights of states and individuals, unleashed a military invasion, suspended civil liberties, denied government by consent, elevated Lincoln to a 'dictator' and effected a lasting centralization of federal power....

"This interpretation falters in what it neglects: slavery....  A continuum of classical liberal thinkers from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill and J.E. Cairnes forged the main intellectual case against the slave system.... [P]ro-Confederate libertarians ... abandon what is perhaps the single most important and beneficial contribution that classical liberalism has made to the human condition: the abolition of slavery.

"[L]ibertarian defenders of the North are keenly aware of both the centrality of slavery to the conflict as well as the importance of the abolitionist cause to the liberal intellectual tradition.... This view recognizes slavery and celebrates its abolition, but it tends to neglect or even rationalize the war’s uglier features and consequences: a dramatic weakening of the constitutional federalism laid out in 1787, a rapid acceleration of the scope and power of the federal government, a precedent-setting assault on habeas corpus and expansion of presidential war powers that persists to the present day — and the horrendous destruction itself....

"In place of both views, and in recognition of their deficiencies, libertarians might develop a better appreciation for the Civil War’s complexity by turning their analysis to the nature of the ruinous agency of the conflict itself.

"War, whether waged to hold human beings in bondage or subjugate a political rebellion, is a consciously coercive action of the political state in its most expansive and direct form. And armed warfare, as both the Union and Confederacy came to discover across four destructive years, is horrifically messy, unpredictable and destructive of human life and human liberty."

Read more: http://www.newsweek.com/what-should-libertarians-think-about-civil-war-354946
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