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You’ve heard me speak of what I call the 3 x 5 card of allowable opinion.
You surely know what I mean.
Well, within libertarianism there’s also a 3 x 5 card.
The respectable libertarians, the folks inside the Beltway who want to be the “adults in the room” whom the New York Times turns to when it wants a libertarian voice, don’t want us to embarrass them, you see.
Oh, it’s quite all right for us to talk about the evils of price controls, or tariffs, or ethanol subsidies.
We can make sure the world knows we’re against slavery, and other enormities nobody in his right mind today defends.
We can be for peace, but watch your language, citizen: how dare you speak of the U.S. government as having an “empire.” And be sure to use regimespeak like “American interests” so you can have a seat at the table.
In other words: be as boring as they are.
Of course, that means being as ineffectual as they are.
(Not to mention completely unloved: who would walk even five paces to hear one of these drones speak?)
Some of us don’t take kindly to being told to follow arbitrary rules.
So for instance: secession is a non-respectable thing to talk about.
Oh, sure, in a closed-door libertarian colloquium you may discuss secession in theory, but that is where it must remain: private, and ethereal. In public, it’s important that we keep within the boundaries of allowable opinion as set by people who can’t stand the sight of us.
Well, today I broke that rule, big time.
Historian Brion McClanahan and I took on an article by one of the respectables that takes people like us to task for holding the wrong opinions about secession in American history.
We teamed up last week to take down another article, and I hope you enjoyed that one.
This one kicks that one’s rear end.
Listen and enjoy:
https://tomwoods.com/ep-1332-should-libertarians-support-secession/
For all my entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs: if you missed the workshop with the great Steve Clayton, who’s helped a boatload of my listeners start successful businesses they love and that they can run from their laptops, the replay will be up only through tomorrow night:
