Secession: "The American Civil War [sic] answered that question"

Truth crushed to the earth is truth still and like a seed will rise again.

Jefferson Davis

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As popular respect for political systems continues to erode, you may have noticed the statists frantically trying to deflate emerging inquiries and debates on the topic of secession. Their principal argument has been the non sequitur "the American Civil War answered that question." Such a response presumes that history expresses immutable principles that transcend time, a proposition that would at once be seen for its inherent absurdity were it applied to scientific understanding. Who was Copernicus to suggest that we live in a heliocentric universe after Ptolemy informed us of the geocentric nature of our world?

Furthermore, the American Revolutionary War was premised on the right of people to secede from existing political systems; and yet the statists are not to be heard using that period as precedent for condemning Lincoln’s suppression of that principle.

If history is to be the standard for propriety in our world, would we not have to defend the principle of slavery, given that the 1857 U.S. Supreme Court case of Dred Scott v. Sandford upheld the legality of the practice? And wouldn’t the fate of Joan of Arc have "answered the question" that political dissenters could be burned at the stake? Or are we, like lawyers, entitled to pick and choose the precedents that serve our particular cause, while carefully "distinguishing" other instances that don’t serve our purposes?

Read Butler Shaffer at LewRockwell.com

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"The American Civil War [sic] answered that question"

How closed and complacent a mind must be to think this way...The same mind assumes or believes that the war was fought solely or primarily over the morality of slavery.

What is right for one group of people is not right for another.  

One thing is for certain:  What is wrong for most Americans is centralized power. 

Some Americans do not mind being granted privileges from Washington, rather than exercising Natural Rights; some do not mind 9 Justices in the Supreme Court making one decision that binds 250 million.  

Some do not mind non representative government;  some do not mind giving up freedom for (what they perceive to be) security."

But I think most Americans do mind these things.

Most of us would prefer to be free to decide what is right for ourselves, our families, and our communities.  Most of us want to be able to decide how best to spend our money and keep most of what we earn.

The only way to assure this is to dismantle centralized power.