Re: Help design the ideal Presidential candidate

On 2008-05-12, Nate Edel <archmage@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Aaron Denney <wnoise@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> On 2008-05-10, William December Starr <wdstarr@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> > David Friedman <ddfr@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> said:
>> > 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.
>
> Which original argument?  My original complaint was with *how* the
seceding
> states went about enacting secession, not either the morality or
legality of
> secession as a general concept. 

Sorry for not being clear.  I was not intending to refer that far back.
David Friedman was talking about Alfred Montestruc's
condemnation of the Union putting down the rebellion, and his argument
was not based so much on the legality of the splitting, which William
December Starr was leading into, but the immorality of not letting regions
split off.  IMO, the analogies made against it fail at a legalistic level,
rather than a moral level.

-- 
Aaron Denney
-><-