Ep. 1332 Should Libertarians Support Secession?
The Tom Woods Show
Tom Woods
4.8 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 31 January 2019
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Historian Brion McClanahan joins me to discuss an article on secession, particularly on the nineteenth-century southern secession, that makes the rounds every once in a while in fashionable libertarian circles. Libertarians can't support secession across the board, the author says, because some seceding states intend great evil once seceded. He further says there's no right of secession of an American state anyway. Are these statements sound? That's what we discuss today.
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Show notes for Ep. 1332
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Tom Woods Show, episode 1332. |
| 0:03.4 | Prepare to set fire to the index card of allowable opinion. |
| 0:08.0 | Your daily dose of liberty education starts here, the Tom Woods Show. |
| 0:14.2 | Folks, the 2019 Contra Cruise is going to be coming up before you know it. |
| 0:17.9 | It is the libertarian event of the year. |
| 0:22.1 | Naomi Brockwell, a guest on the show, recently said it was the best event she had ever been to. We're going to be joined by |
| 0:28.1 | special guests Gene Epstein and Brad and Deidre Berzer this year. Join Bob Murphy and me and a ton |
| 0:33.7 | of wonderful, genial folks for the adventure of a lifetime as we set sail for Alaska, |
| 0:39.1 | July 5th through the 12th, 2019. Get the details at contracruise.com. |
| 0:44.7 | Hello, everybody. Tom Woods here. Very glad to be back with Brian McClanahan once again. |
| 0:48.9 | We just talked to Brian last week, but doggone it, there's so much to be replied to out there on the internet. |
| 0:56.0 | And Brian and I are going to take on an article that I've been telling you about that keeps |
| 1:00.7 | getting tweeted out periodically in certain libertarian circles. |
| 1:05.7 | Let's just put it that way. |
| 1:07.1 | And the article is called, it's over at libertarianism.org, and it's called why, and then in quotation marks, libertarian, defenses of the Confederacy and, quote, states rights are incoherent by a fellow named Jonathan Blanks. So of course I'll link to the article at tomwoods.com slash 1332. You can look at it for yourself. |
| 1:29.2 | But it raises what I think are some fairly conventional arguments against secession in general |
| 1:36.2 | and allowing the southern secession in particular. |
| 1:39.7 | These are arguments you could easily encounter on any mainstream website, any left-wing website. |
| 1:46.8 | Really, any website that's going to take the conventional view on things will repeat more or less the arguments you're going to find in this article. |
| 1:55.5 | And as Brian and I will be talking about, the author begins with – well, you know what, let me leave that for our |
| 2:02.9 | discussion with Brian. Remember, Brian is the host of the Brian McClanahan show, which recently |
| 2:07.4 | surpassed 200 episodes. You can check him out on iTunes, Stitcher, wherever you get podcasts. |
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