141st Anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s death

Huntington News ^ | September 23, 2011 | Calvin E. Johnson, Jr.

[BigReb555]

General Lee died at his home at Lexington, Virginia at 9:30 AM on Wednesday, October 12, 1870.

[Opinionated Blowhard]

I always love these threads. The new South conservatives meet the old North conservatives and the Civil War is re-fought. Lee and others where honorable for their time but the talk about the Confederacy being a noble, freedom-loving government fighting against the tyranical North and “dictator” Lincoln is a twisted fantasy.

The politicians who ran the Confederacy were thugs who wanted to keep the slave system to keep their power and wealth. They were Democrats who oppressed the black man even worse than Dems oppress blacks today. While the state itself is a beautiful place, the government of Virginia circa 1860 was a group of nasty, thuggish Democrats interested in keeping their slaves.

The closest historical parallel to how the military and government interacted I can think of —and this is limited—is Nazi Germany. Officers like Lee were driven by a code of honor like the old Prussian officers. But then the government they served was populated by a bunch of racist thugs.

[onedoug]

If soetoro were reelected, I too would become a traitor to federal authority.
And I doubt there´d be any ¨...malice toward none and charity for all¨ for me.

[PGalt]

Thanks for the ping; post. Fascinating thread. Thanks to every poster.

As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose — that it may violate property instead of protecting it — then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious. To know this, it is hardly necessary to examine what transpires in the French and English legislatures; merely to understand the issue is to know the answer.

Is there any need to offer proof that this odious perversion of the law is a perpetual source of hatred and discord; that it tends to destroy society itself? If such proof is needed, look at the United States [in 1850]. There is no country in the world where the law is kept more within its proper domain: the protection of every person’s liberty and property. As a consequence of this, there appears to be no country in the world where the social order rests on a firmer foundation. But even in the United States, there are two issues — and only two — that have always endangered the public peace.

What are these two issues? They are slavery and tariffs. These are the only two issues where, contrary to the general spirit of the republic of the United States, law has assumed the character of a plunderer.

Slavery is a violation, by law, of liberty. The protective tariff is a violation, by law, of property.

It is a most remarkable fact that this double legal crime — a sorrowful inheritance from the Old World — should be the only issue which can, and perhaps will, lead to the ruin of the Union. It is indeed impossible to imagine, at the very heart of a society, a more astounding fact than this: The law has come to be an instrument of injustice. And if this fact brings terrible consequences to the United States — where the proper purpose of the law has been perverted only in the instances of slavery and tariffs — what must be the consequences in Europe, where the perversion of the law is a principle; a system?

But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law — which may be an isolated case — is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.

Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. All these plans as a whole — with their common aim of legal plunder — constitute socialism.

It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.

Above all, if you wish to be strong, begin by rooting out every particle of socialism that may have crept into your legislation. This will be no light task.

Frederic Bastiat 1801-1850