I’m on Twitter Now

Posted by Tom Woods on May 11th, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Yes, I’ve gone and done it.  Follow me!

The New Deal, as Taught by Me

Posted by Tom Woods on May 11th, 2010 | No Comments »

I’ll be offering a course on the New Deal at the new Mises Academy this fall, called The New Deal: History, Economics, and Law.  (Scroll down.)  Here’s the description: “This course examines the critical period of American history from the stock market crash of 1929 to the end of World War II, focusing on domestic affairs. Topics include: the 1920s boom and bust, the Hoover record in light of recent scholarship, the New Deal programs and agencies, the evolution of the Supreme Court, international parallels, political and intellectual opposition to FDR, and the economic consequences of World War II. Readings include primary documents, works by contemporaries, and recent scholarship and commentary.”  Know someone who might be interested?  Please send the link along.

“Glenn Beck Should Revere Theodore Roosevelt”

Posted by Tom Woods on May 6th, 2010 | 5 Comments »

That’s the creepy title of a Newsmax article taking Glenn Beck to task for being critical of Teddy Roosevelt.  Read the article for yourself. It’s written at a third-grade level, and amounts to a list of standard leftist assertions that “most reasonable Americans” agree with.  (Remember, Newsmax is a “conservative” publication.)  The author is charmingly unaware of the existing literature on antitrust and what it says about TR’s arbitrary behavior.  Instead, the entire discussion amounts to: why, there were Robber Barons out there!  Really, the whole article is like this.

For an antidote, see my review of Jim Powell’s book Bully Boy: The Truth About Theodore Roosevelt’s Legacy.  (For whatever reason, Powell’s books are written in extremely dull prose, and thus they have not been read as often as their content would justify.)

The Return of a Forbidden Idea

Posted by Tom Woods on May 4th, 2010 | No Comments »

The other day I discussed my forthcoming book, Nullification, on the Lew Rockwell Show.  Have a listen.

My Letter to a Smear Artist

Posted by Tom Woods on May 4th, 2010 | 4 Comments »

Even though state nullification was more often employed in the nineteenth century by northern states than by southern, and the movement today is in evidence all over the country — north, south, east and west – you’ll never guess the line the smearbund is adopting. I’m telling you, you’ll just never guess.

All right, I’ll tell you. Their reply to all this is: “Confederate Confederate Confederate slavery slavery slavery racism racism racism.”  Good old establishment Left.  Always something new and interesting to say.

Lou Dubose, a conventional leftist who takes criticism of the federal government personally, recently wrote a piece called “Confederates in the Attic” for a subscription-only pro-regime site. I am one of those alleged “Confederates,” since Lou seems to think my opposition to government makes an exception for the Southern confederacy of 1861-1865. Lou is worried about my forthcoming book, Nullification.  He warns that hundreds of people at CPAC loved my speech on the subject.  It’s all very sinister.

Right now California is on the verge of decriminalizing marijuana, in an act of defiance of the federal government.  Lou Dubose looks around the country, sees decentralizing forces like this everywhere, and responds, “Confederate Confederate Confederate Confederate Confederate Confederate Confederate.”

Lou, we’ve duly noted your contribution. Thanks a bunch.

Here’s the reply I sent to Conventional Lou, the guy who thinks the federal government is super-dangerous when a George W. Bush is running it, but that we should keep it just as powerful as it is now even though it could fall into the hands of another George W. Bush. Actually trying to stop the federal government’s anti-social behavior, on the other hand? What are you, a “neo-Confederate”?

Mr. Dubose:

Someone just forwarded me your article. What a shame. I actually read and enjoyed your book Vice, and I’ve heard you interviewed on Antiwar Radio with my friend Charles Goyette. Murray Polner and I included an article from the Texas Observer, where I understand you were once associated, in our book We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now (Basic Books, 2008).

All of us in the Ron Paul/Campaign for Liberty mold are antiwar (much, much more so than Obama and his followers, to say the least), anti-torture, pro-civil liberties, and anti-drug war. Isn’t that a set of policies that would favor racial minorities? I’ve never understood all the hysteria against us.

Wouldn’t nullification have been nice for California and Washington state to have tried when Japanese-Americans were being rounded up by the progressive U.S. government? I sure would have favored it.

Digging out old articles from the 1990s is silly, as I’m sure you know. (If you’d like to know how I feel about the abolitionists you could read We Who Dared to Say No to War (2008), which includes several notable ones.) You could also dig out articles showing I used to be pro-war. What would that prove, other than that I’ve moved from neoconservatism to paleoconservatism and (for the past nine years) to libertarianism?

[You can even find, as late as 1999, in a scholarly journal called American Studies, an article I wrote critical of capitalism from a traditionalist perspective.  Are you going to trot that out and say my free-market credentials aren't so clear after all?  Probably not, since you'd look ridiculous.  I do have a pretty substantial online archive of my recent writing you can read without having to use the Wayback Machine, that might give you a slightly better sense of my worldview.]

California is considering decriminalizing marijuana across the board. That’s also nullification. Are they to be condemned? Whatever happened to the tradition of decentralism on the Left, a la Kirkpatrick Sale? These days the Left hems and haws about the U.S. government (when it’s out of power, of course), but balks at any actual opposition to it, apart from a few pretty speeches.

Some of us are a little more impatient than that.

Finally, what a shame you didn’t bother to mention that in front of a CPAC crowd I criticized both the draft and preemptive war.

Long live decentralization! Nationalism had its day with the states’-rights-hating Hitler. Let’s return to a humane scale of living.

Very best,
Tom Woods

Come to Iowa!

Posted by Tom Woods on April 23rd, 2010 | No Comments »

Ron Paul urges people to come to the Campaign for Liberty regional conference in Iowa, May 14-16.  Except for the political training session, which is $59, the entire event is free.  Saturday will feature sessions on the economy, foreign policy, and federalism — and where non-neocon conservatives should stand on these things.  I’ll be speaking, as well as Bruce Fein, Bob Murphy, and others.  Hope to see you.

Austrian Economics: Where to Start

Posted by Tom Woods on April 20th, 2010 | No Comments »

For people visiting the site for the first time, please be sure to see the reading (and listening) lists (here and here) I compiled to help introduce people to Austrian economics.  There’s also the archive of media from Mises University, the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s summer instructional program.  Enjoy!

Gee, I’m So Intimidated by These Experts!

Posted by Tom Woods on April 6th, 2010 | 6 Comments »

Here’s Princeton’s Sean Wilentz writing about nullification.  Here’s my reply, which exposes him as an uninformed propagandist.  (“Uninformed” is exceedingly kind, as you’ll see.)  Much more where that came from in Nullification, my forthcoming book.

And below is a YouTube version of my appearance on NPR, opposite Duke Law School’s Neil Siegel.  Siegel acknowledges none of my arguments, each of which undermines what he is trying to say.  We get a lot of the usual propaganda about the sinister intentions of those who oppose the regime, with Siegel solemnly informing us about how deeply concerned he is, blah blah blah.  His defense of the constitutionality of the health-care bill consists of an irrelevant aside about the Committee on Detail, but never points to an actual constitutional clause.  He seems unaware of the purposes for which nullification has been employed in the past.  If this is the best they can do, we are going to keep steamrolling them.

Follow Me on Facebook

Posted by Tom Woods on April 5th, 2010 | 3 Comments »

My personal account has reached the 5,000-friend limit, but I’ve since taken over as administrator of a Thomas E. Woods Jr. fan page someone started some time ago.  I’ll be posting there more and more.

Nullification!

Posted by Tom Woods on March 23rd, 2010 | 15 Comments »

My next book, slated for June 29 release, is called Nullification, with a subtitle to be determined.  I’ll send out a notice to everyone on my newsletter list (see the right-hand column of the home page here at TomWoods.com) when it comes out.

The book seeks to detoxify this unjustly maligned Jeffersonian remedy.  When the New York Times ran a relatively even-handed article on the subject last week, the comments section was filled with statements so ignorant they shocked even me, and my expectations for Times comments are pretty low.  All these people could do was repeat what their seventh-grade teacher had told them about slavery and states’ rights.  Not a hint that they knew about the use of nullification by the New England states against Jefferson’s embargo, against the calling up of the militia for the invasion of Canada during the War of 1812, against military conscription, and against the enlistment of minors without the consent of their parents.

And that’s not to mention how abolitionists used nullification in their efforts against the fugitive-slave acts.  Yes, there is a fugitive-slave clause in the Constitution, but the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was nevertheless open to constitutional objection, and object the abolitionists did.  They even cited John C. Calhoun by name in formulating their arguments; no one had told them, evidently, that anyone referring to Calhoun must be a gratuitously wicked slavery supporter.

This need not even be a traditional left-right issue.  Before the Left decided that the bureaucratization of all of life, administered by a remote central government, was the ideal social arrangement, some on the Left considered such a system repulsive and inhumane.  Kirkpatrick Sale, for instance, argued in his book Human Scale that so much of modern life, its political dimension included, had grown dysfunctional simply by virtue of having grown.  Everything was simply much too big, its scale grotesquely out of proportion to what a humane existence would appear to demand.

Some of this earlier decentralist spirit is still alive in community-supported agriculture, the defense of farmers’ markets against federal incursions, and the “small is beautiful” outlook in general – causes associated in the public mind with, but by no means confined to, the Left.  It is this spirit that would find nullification and what came to be known as the Principles of ’98 congenial, and it is in this spirit that today’s burgeoning nullification movement has made inroads among the Left.  Yes, Vermont and Kansas may use nullification, which the Kentucky Resolutions of 1799 described as the states’ “rightful remedy” against unconstitutional federal power grabs, for different purposes.  Vermont may object to one unconstitutional law and Kansas another.  Heaven knows there are plenty to choose from.  But for those who do not feel compelled to mold every last community in America into their own image, and prefer instead to live and let live and mind their own business, this is quite all right.  We might actually wind up with the diverse collection of self-governing communities the ratifiers of the Constitution thought they were protecting.