If you are interested in economics, government around the world, and liberty themes, you should check out the von Mises Institute daily email newsletter. They churn out a consistent high quality of analysis and education. You may not agree with 100% of each authors view, but you will end up better informed than before. Their website is easy to find with an Internet search. We include a small sample of todays article on Five Lessons Learned from the Scottish Referendum: ------------------------------------------------------------ Lesson 3: American Ideas about Secession Are Unsophisticated and Parochial For a great many Americans, the concept of secession is meaningless outside the context of the American Civil War. Since it is conveniently never mentioned that the American Revolution was the result of American secession from the British Empire, Americans know virtually nothing of any other secession movement in history in any other context except the Confederacy and slavery. Some Americans of a certain age associate secession with the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, wrongly thinking that war to be caused by secession and not by decades of centralizing communist rule. So, most Americans, when faced with a question of secession, have only two responses: (1) If you want secession you must want “balkanization.” By this, it is meant that secession equals ethnic cleansing and bloody civil war. (2) “If you want secession, you must be racist.” Because, of course, secession could serve no possible purpose other than the spread of slavery. The Scottish question has made it clear that in the rest of the world, most educated human beings understand that secession has been used in a wide variety of historical and political contexts. Obviously, slavery has nothing at all to do with the secession movements in Quebec, Scotland, Veneto, or Catalonia. Moreover, Americans in the typical fashion of authoritarians who justify any unjust state of affairs by dogmatically repeating the phrase “it’s the law” act as if the matter of regional autonomy and independence was settled once and for all in 1865 by the Civil War. Presumably, for these people, the matter has been settled until the End of Time, because some other people — all of whom are now long-dead — fought a war about it. It requires truly awe-inspiring levels of philistinism to think that something political is forever settled because of something someone else did a century and half ago. Among more rational and reasonable groups of humans, however, it is recognized that political conditions and allegiances change constantly. At the same time, the pro-secessionists in America who dogmatically invoke the United States constitution of 1787 as proof of secession’s legality, will continue to fail to win converts. The constitution as envisioned by those who wrote it has been dead and buried for at least a century. The old interpretation is far too limiting in any case, and only applies to full US states, and not to portions of states.
Posted on: Sat, 20 Sep 2014 12:39:50 +0000
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