Would it surprise you to hear that a statist warrior is honored this weekend at anti-state/anti-war lewrockwell.com? Of course it’s Robert E. Lee.

This dovetails nicely with Rockwell’s recent talk at a Costs Of War conference. Rockwell paints the confederates as victims of economic exploitation and champions of economic freedom:

Free trade, Calhoun believed, represented the ultimate safeguard of political rights. Without such trade, the South would become a captive nation, enserfed for a cabal of Northern industrialists tied to and dependent upon government power.

That may be true enough as far as it goes, but at some point don’t you have to acknowledge that slaving statists cede the moral high ground with regard to economic exploitation? From Calhoun’s speech to the Senate Slavery, A Positive Good:

But I take higher ground. I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good � a positive good. I feel myself called upon to speak freely upon the subject where the honor and interests of those I represent are involved. I hold then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other. Broad and general as is this assertion, it is fully borne out by history. This is not the proper occasion, but, if it were, it would not be difficult to trace the various devices by which the wealth of all civilized communities has been so unequally divided, and to show by what means so small a share has been allotted to those by whose labor it was produced, and so large a share given to the non-producing classes. The devices are almost innumerable, from the brute force and gross superstition of ancient times, to the subtle and artful fiscal contrivances of modern. I might well challenge a comparison between them and the more direct, simple, and patriarchal mode by which the labor of the African race is, among us, commanded by the European. I may say with truth, that in few countries so much is left to the share of the laborer, and so little exacted from him, or where there is more kind attention paid to him in sickness or infirmities of age. Compare his condition with the tenants of the poor houses in the more civilized portions of Europe � look at the sick, and the old and infirm slave, on one hand, in the midst of his family and friends, under the kind superintending care of his master and mistress, and compare it with the forlorn and wretched condition of the pauper in the poorhouse. But I will not dwell on this aspect of the question; I turn to the political; and here I fearlessly assert that the existing relation between the two races in the South, against which these blind fanatics are waging war, forms the most solid and durable foundation on which to rear free and stable political institutions. It is useless to disguise the fact. There is and always has been in an advanced stage of wealth and civilization, a conflict between labor and capital. The condition of society in the South exempts us from the disorders and dangers resulting from this conflict; and which explains why it is that the political condition of the slaveholding States has been so much more stable and quiet than that of the North.

Let that sink in.

I’ll grant that the Civil War wasn’t fought by the North to free the slaves, but isn’t it clear that the threat of abolition was of the gravest concern to this supposed champion of free trade?

This fetish for the Confederacy at LRC is regrettable.

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