Don’t You Dare Mention Nullify and Guns
by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
TomWoods.com
Recently
by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.: The
Central Committee Has Handed Down Its Denunciation
A very predictable
progressive, I might add. Once in a while a progressive, like Jeff
Taylor at Jacksonville State, realizes that gigantic, unresponsive
bureaucracies that bomb foreign populations at the drop of a hat,
just might – might! – not be so progressive. And that
the old progressive slogan “small is beautiful” just might
apply to the political order as well.
But then there
are the Predictable Progressives, who stick to the 3×5 card
of allowable opinion, and trot out all the old arguments. Half the
time they’re not even arguments. It’s just, “Hey,
this is an old idea! That means itÂ’s stupid. Today weÂ’re
so much more sophisticated. The modern state has showered the world
with so many blessings; what kind of uppity troublemaker could ever
want to challenge it?”
Hence the “Progressive
Professor,” who teaches at Florida Atlantic University, has
a blog post called “Rand
Paul Revives Nullification from the Pre-Civil War Years.”
He writes:
By bringing
up “nullification,” [Paul] is forgetting that the Civil
War was fought over precisely that issue, the concept of states
rights, that a state could nullify laws or actions of the federal
government. And that viewpoint lost the war!
Rand Paul is
not “forgetting” the Civil War, obviously, so that snide
comment serves no purpose. The Civil War was not fought over nullification;
in fact, South Carolina complained about nullification in its ordinance
of secession, and Jefferson Davis condemned it in his farewell speech
to the U.S. Senate. The war was indeed fought over the concept of
state sovereignty, but it is obviously correct that the peoples
of the states were sovereign. I
have covered this. I am waiting for someone to refute me. Maybe
the Progressive Professor will try. Probably not.
January
22, 2013
Thomas
E. Woods, Jr. [send him
mail; visit his
website], a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute,
is the creator of Tom
Woods’s Liberty Classroom, a libertarian educational
resource. He is the author of eleven books, including the New
York Times bestsellers Meltdown
(on the financial crisis; read Ron Paul’s foreword)
and The
Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, and most
recently Nullification
and Rollback.
Copyright
© 2013 Thomas
Woods