 Our final speaker this morning before our Q&A is of course Lou Rockwell who needs no introduction to most of you The founder of the Mises Institute more than 30 years ago. Also our chairman And what I was thinking as we were driving last night from the airport I'm not sure that since Murray Rothbard died in the 1990s that there's anyone in the West or anyone in the U.S Who for whom we can say has been a more steadfast and consistent? anti-state public intellectual than Lou Rockwell and we appreciate it very much Lou So I'm going to talk about the libertarian principle of secession For a century and a half the idea of secession has been systematically demonized among the American public The government schools spin fairy tales about the indivisible union and the wise statesmen who fought to preserve it Decentralization is portrayed as unsophisticated and backward while nationalism and centralization Are made to seem progressive and inevitable When a smaller political unit wishes Excuse me When a smaller political unit wishes to withdraw from a larger one its motives must be Disreputable and base While the motives of the central power seeking to keep that unit in an arrangement It does not want are portrayed as selfless and patriotic if they're discussed at all as usual disinformation campaigns are meant to take to make potentially Liberating ideas appear toxic and dangerous Conveying the message that anyone who seeks acceptance and popularity ought to steer clear of whatever it is in this case secession the regime is condemned For when we see a problem, but when we set the propaganda aside we discover the support for secession means simply this It is morally illegitimate to deploy state violence against individuals who choose to group themselves differently From the way the existing regime chooses to group them. They prefer to live under a different jurisdiction Libertarians consider it unacceptable to aggress against them for this The libertarian principle of secession It's not exactly embraced with enthusiasm By the people and the institutions I call regime libertarians Although these people tend to be located in and around the Beltway Regime libertarians are not a matter of geographic location, which is why I coined the special term for them The regime libertarian believes in the market economy more or less But talk about the Federal Reserve or Austrian business cycle theory and he gets fidgety His magazine or Institute would far rather invite Jen and yell into a cocktail reception than Ron Paul to a lecture The regime libertarian loves the idea of reform whether it's the Fed government schools or whatever But he flees from the idea of abolition. Why? That's just not respectable He spends his time advocating this or that tax reform effort for example But never discusses the idea of repealing or lowering existing taxes It's too tough to be a libertarian when it comes to anti-discrimination law given how much Flak one is liable to take over it so we'll side with left liberals Even though that's completely incompatible with his stated principles He's anti-war sometimes He can be counted on to support the wars However, that have practically defined the American regime and which remained popular among the general public He sucks and happy concord with supporters the most egregiously unjust wars But his blood boils in moral outrage at someone who told an off-color joke 25 years ago I suppose you can guess where our regime libertarians stand on secession Since the modern American regime emerged out of the violent suppression of the attempted secession of 11 states He too is an opponent of secession If cornered he may grudgingly Endorse secession at a theoretical level, but in practice. He generally seems to support only those acts of secession That have the approval or connivance of the CIA Mentioned secession and the subject immediately turns to the Southern Confederacy Whose moral enormity is the regime libertarian proceeds to denounce And said he running insinuating that supporters of secession must be turning a blind eye to those enormities But every libertarian worthy of the name opposes any government support for slavery centralization Inflation conscription Taxation or the suppression of speech and press it goes without saying We shouldn't be surprised by this kind of charge though accusing libertarians of sympathy for slavery because they oppose wars of centralization is the intellectual cousin of the regime's familiar claim that opponents of the war in Iraq must have secretly supported Saddam Hussein or that Opponents of US intervention in World War one. We're just apologists for the Kaiser We expect juvenile nonsense like this from neo conservatives and from the regime itself When it emerges from the pens of alleged libertarians, it says far more about them and their own allegiances that it does about us As Tom Woods will point out this afternoon the classical liberal or libertarian tradition of support for secession Both such luminaries as Alexis de Tocqueville Richard Comden and Lord Acton among many others But I'd like to take talk about two other figures in the 19th century Liza Andrew Spooner and in the 20th century Frank Chodorov Spooner presents a real problem for the regime libertarians every libertarian acknowledges the greatness and the importance of Spooner The trouble is he was an avowed secessionist As Andrew Spooner was born in Massachusetts in 1808 and went on to become a lawyer an entrepreneur and a political theorist He believed the true justice was not so much a matter of compliance with state with man-made law But a refusal to engage in aggression against peaceful individuals His American letter mail company competed successfully against the US post office Offering better services and lower prices till the government forced it out of business in 1851 His work called the unconstitutionality in his work called the unconstitutionality of slavery Spooner argued that the primary interpretive key and understanding the Constitution was what we now call Original meaning this is different from original understanding the concept referred to by figures like Robert Bork and Antonine Scalia According to this view we should interpret the Constitution according to the original intent of those who drafted it and ratified the document Spooner rejected this what mattered according to Spooner was not the inscrutable intention behind this or that word or passage But the clear meaning of the part of the word or passage itself Furthermore given that human liberty was a mandate of the natural law anytime Constitutional language might appear to run contrary to the principle of liberty We ought to prefer some other meaning of the word in question Even if we have to strain a bit to do so and even if the anti-liberty interpretation is the more natural reading The Spooner could claim contrary to the majority of abolitionists that the Constitution was in fact an anti-slavery document And that is unique and it's a bleak and fleeting references to slavery and the Constitution never used that word Did not have to carry the meanings commonly attributed to them Frederick Douglass the celebrated former slave turned abolitionist writer and speaker adopted Spooner's approach in his own work Spooner's anti-slavery work went well beyond this exercise in constitutional exegesis He provided legal services sometimes pro bono for fugitive slaves and advocated jury nullification as a means of defending the escaped slaves in court His 1858 plan for the abolition of slavery called for insurrection in the south as well as lesser measures such as flogging slaveholders who themselves use the whip And encouraging slaves to confiscate their master's property Spooner's approach was informed by four principles. He said which were the with which he introduced his plan one The slaves have a natural right to their liberty To they have a natural right to compensation so far as the property of the slave owner Can compensate them for the wrongs they have suffered Three that so long as the governments under which they live refuse to give them liberty or compensation They have the right to take it by strategy or force for that is the duty of all who can to assist them in this enterprise Spooner was even a supporter of John Brown and in fact raised money and formulated a plan to kidnap the governor of Virginia until Brown was released In other words, it would be difficult to deny Spooner's dedication to the anti-slavery cause and yet here is Spooner on the so-called civil war Quote on the part of the north the war was carried on not to liberate slaves But by a government that had always perverted and violated the Constitution to keep the slaves in bondage and was still willing to do So if the slaveholders could thereby be induced to stay in the union But we've on Mises give a succinct expression of the libertarian view of secession when he said no people and no part of a people Shall be held against its will in a political association. It does not want simple According to Spooner the US regime waged the war on behalf of the opposite principle the principle on which the war was waged By the north was simply this That men may rightfully be compelled to submit to and support a government They do not want and that resistance on their part makes them traitors and criminals Spooner continued no principle that it is possible to be named can be more self-evidently false than this or more self-evidently Fatal fatal to all political freedom It had triumphed in the field and is now assumed to be established If it really be established the number of slaves instead of having been diminished by the war has been greatly increased For a man that's subjected to a government that he does not want is a slave And there is no difference in principle, but only in degree between political and chattel slavery The former no less of the latter denies a man's ownership of himself and the products of his labor and Asserts that other men may own him and dispose of him and his property for their own uses and at their own pleasure Spooner was withering on the Lincoln regime and the northern mythology of the war and its allegedly noble origins These were all he said gross shameless Transparent cheats so transparent that they ought to deceive no one By the logic of the regime libertarian Spooner must have been a neo-confederate defender of slavery after all He asserted the southern states right to withdraw from the Union. This is too preposterous even for them Spooner was correct about all this needless to say the war was in fact launched not to free the slaves as any historian must concede But for the purposes of mysticism why the sacred Union must be preserved and on behalf of economic interests The regime libertarian expects us to believe that the analysis we apply to all other wars in which we look beneath the official Rationals to the true motivations does not apply to this single Glorious exception to the catalogue of crimes that constitute the story of mankind's experience with military aggression Let's turn out of the second libertarian figure. I've chosen to discuss today Frank Chodorov was one of the great writers of the old Right Liberty fund publishes a collection of his essays the Mises Institute publishes some of his books and they're Available in the bookstore today Chodorov founded what was then called the intercollegiate Society of individualists and served as editor of an editor of human events where the early presence of Felix Morley Ensure that non-interventionist voices at least in the beginning to get a hearing Marian Rothbard considered Chodorov's monthly journal analysis to be one of the great independent publications in American history We're very glad to have the complete run of analysis in the Mises Institute archives Naturally Chodorov supported both the session and states rights In fact, he thought every school child should quote become familiar with the history and theory of what we call states rights But with really just the doctrine of home rule Ralph Raco the great libertarian historian and senior fellow of the Mises Institute has documented how the decentralized Political order of Europe made possible the emergence of liberty The lack of a single political authority uniting Europe and to the contrary a vast Multiplicity of small jurisdictions place a strict limit on the ambition of any particular prince The ability to move from one place to another meant that a prince would be loses tax base if he if his oppressions grew intolerable Chodorov made a similar observation Quote when the individual is free to move from one jurisdiction to another a limit is put on the extent to which the government May use its monopoly power Government is held in restraint by the fear of losing its tax-paying citizens Just as the loss of customers tends to keep other monopolies from getting too arrogant Chodorov noted in the in the years leading up to the New Deal in 1933 various states embarked upon quasi Socialistic experiments who referred to a Wisconsin law passed early on the depression that required restaurants to serve two ounces of Wisconsin-made cheese with every meal whether the patron wanted it or not He mentioned the platform of the farm labor party which emerged in several states What caused these and other schemes to fail was people's ability to move their capital and their physical bodies across state lines The federal government socialism on the other hand in Chodorov's words Could be made to operate somehow only because there was no escape from its constabulary No tyrant ever supports divided or decentralized power which is why 20th century totalitarians were such opponents of federalism By the way Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf specifically denounces secession and federalism So the US regime too has devoted over two centuries to dismantling the barriers the states once imposed to the untrammeled exercise of power As Chodorov put it quote the unlikelihood of getting the states to vote themselves out of existence turn the centralizers to other means Such as bribing the state authorities patronage alienating the loyalties of the citizens with federal subsidies Establishing within the states independent administrative bodies to manage federal works programs Here's our Chodorov concludes Quote there is no end of trouble the states can give the centralizers by merely refusing to cooperate Such refusal would meet with popular acclaim if it were supplemented with a campaign of education on the meaning of states rights in terms of human freedom In fact the educational part of such a secessionist movement should be given the first importance And those who are plumping for a third party because both existing parties are centralist and character Would do well to nail to their master at this banner secession of the 48 states from Washington Now there's a libertarian speaking Secession is not a popular idea among the political and media classes in America to be sure and regime libertarians may roll their eyes at it But a recent poll found that about a quarter of Americans are sympathetic to the idea Despite the ceaseless barrage of nationalist propaganda emitted from all sides a Result like this confirms what we already suspect that a substantial chunk of the public is willing to entertain unconventional thoughts And that's all to the good Conventional American thoughts are war centralization redistribution and inflation The most unconventional thought in America today is liberty