I dunno, but Ron Paul seems a bit clueless about a bunch of things. Had Ron Paul been president in place of James Buchanan, would Lincoln’s plight been any different?
Doubtful.
In addition, the concept of buying the freedom of 4 million slaves seems ludicrous on three fronts: 1) where would Ron Paul get that kind of money pre-Civil War? 2) the concept runs contrary to Ron Paul’s liberatarian “no taxes, no government” nihilistic creed, and 3) why doesn’t Ron Paul simply say that since the African slaves were human, all that was needed was across-the-board emancipation? No government funds spent, no taxes increased, no sweat!
The man is a living, walking bag of contradictions.
6 Comments
December 26, 2007 at 9:23 pm
[...] The Shot! created an interesting post today on Politics: Ron Paul gets wacky on LincolnHere’s a short outline [...]
December 26, 2007 at 9:33 pm
You’re confused.
Paul never said to end all taxes – just the income tax. The federal government gets alot of taxes in other ways.
And how did Lincoln get the money to fund the war? That’s the money that would be used to buy the slaves and their wouldn’t have been 600 thousand dead Americans.
December 26, 2007 at 9:44 pm
Wow. I am almost impressed that a propaulist would find my little blog so quickly after I make a post about Ron Paul. It only took ya 35 minutes, TJ.
But thank you for your commentary.
Fact is, Ron Paul and his supporters are having a very wet dream if they believe that more than 10% of southern slave owners would have even entertained an offer to buy all of their slaves. A fact which Ron Paul supporters would prefer thinking Americans skip over. Ron Paul’s stance on the issue is little more than revisionist history.
As I suggest, Ron Paul would be much more credible in his critique of Abe Lincoln if he’d simply state that the African slaves were humans who should never have been subjected to slavery in the first place.
But that would put him in the same place as Lincoln with the Emancipation Proclamation. Or is that too difficult for Ron Paul to do?
December 27, 2007 at 4:14 am
Your video has vanished. Somebody must have decided it violated either YouTube’s TOS or candidate Paul’s image.
Lincoln moved heaven and earth to get slaveowners to accept compensated emancipation of their slaves IN THE NORTH (the four slave states that did NOT secede from the union in 1860-61, namely Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri). Without success. Only West Virginia, which did not exist as a state before 1863, voted in emancipation before the ratification of the US Constitution’s 13th amendment, and they only did that after the Emancipation Proclamation, and after the US Congress returned its first petition for statehood with the words (paraphrased) “emancipate or else”.
One of the arguments raised by the slaveholders was indeed that it would be “too expensive”. Lincoln’s response: to buy every slave at the then-current market value would take a sum of money equivalent to (if I remember rightly – my source is James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, which is not to hand at the moment) two months of Union war expenditures.
Paul and his supporters seem not to realize that the pressures of taxation come mostly from the taxpayers themselves. Which he will see in his approval ratings should he ever a. get to be President and b. get his legislation enacted. It will take about six minutes for just about every voter in the US to figure out they’ve been shafted in some way, and they’ll turn on the good Doctor big time.
I understand he wishes to abolish the Department of Education. I’ll bet he wishes to abolish the National Science Foundation too, given his stance on evolution – which means he has absolute zero chance of getting my vote. But I digress. The ante-bellum American South had a literacy rate, among free whites (i.e., not counting slaves who learned to read at the peril of their lives, not to mention those of the ones who taught them) of around 45%. The cotton oligarchs saw no more reason to educate white peons than black chattels. We are already too damned close to repeating this circumstance without reconstituting the Libertarian policies of the proto-Confederacy.
While trying to see if I could figure out where the video you cited disappeared to, I found another claiming to be from the Paul camp, one that contained snippets from the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The relevance of these snippets to Paul’s campaign positions was not made clear, and I could not nut it out from the video. But I decided I didn’t have to when I saw this comment attached to it:
Lincoln was vermin. He was not fit to shine Dr Paul’s shoes.
Lincoln referred to American republicanism (”democracy”) as The Great Experiment – and fretted about its failure. I am now convinced that it has failed. Our next President should present himself in sackcloth and ashes to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (or her son Charles if, by 2009, Elizabeth has gone to her eternal reward), beg forgiveness for our past transgressions, and request readmission to the Empire – of which Elizabeth/Charles shall be the absolute ruling monarch, dissolving Congress and imposing world-saving policies which we are too stupid to enact for ourselves.
December 27, 2007 at 11:15 am
It should come as no surprise that Dr. Paul is an ob/gyn and that he staunchest supporters spend too much of their time lying supine with the good doctor’s face firmly implanted in their collective posterior regions. I am sure Dr. Paul is a fine medical man but he is far too simplistic to ever be a competent political leader.
December 28, 2007 at 11:19 pm
Ron Paul is mad as a hatter, and I know because, cough cough , I’m Alice.
Anyhoo. The fact that restitution was not paid at the time is the reason for what we have now. Mathematically compounding over two hundred years the result of the oppression an of freeing slaves without economic compensation had created a situation which is almost insurmountable.