Re: Help design the ideal Presidential candidate

On 2008-05-10, William December Starr <wdstarr@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> In article <ddfr-ED5F26.10430109052008@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
> David Friedman <ddfr@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> said:
>
>> The argument obviously runs into trouble in states where the
>> blacks were a majority, if there were some, as there well may have
>> been.  And it runs into a more fundamental problem in treating
>> majority vote as if it were unanimous consent.  As you have
>> suggested, the same argument that implies the state can secede
>> from the union implies that the town can secede from the state and
>> I from the town.
>
> I'm not sure that analogy holds, because I'm far from certain that
> either (a) when the Constitution was ratified in 1789 or even (b)
> when the secession issue became "hot" decades later the relationship
> between the individual States and the Union was -- except for areas
> of federal superiority explicitly created by the Constitution --
> anywhere nearly as hierarchical, as servant-and-master if you will,
> as that between a town and the state _under_ whose laws it had any
> official existence at all.  The Union may have _admitted_ states but
> they did not, before or after joining it, depend upon it for their
> legal existence as sovereign entities, if you follow me.

The original argument was about the morality of secession, not the
legality.

-- 
Aaron Denney
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