Libertarians talk about "State Sovereignty," but they will never do so in the context of the states being sovereign nations: here's why they must do so. by Brian McCandliss
(libertarian)
Monday, March 21, 2011
The problem with the Libertarian movement, as I see it, is in their failure to assert that the states are sovereign nations under international law. Rather, at most, they will only talk of "state sovereignty--" but will not place this in the modern context of "sovereign nations," which is the modern term for absolute sovereignty, as when speaking of sovereign states such as England or France.
This is not merely a semantic difference; for the term "state sovereignty," in reference to the United States, now refers to something less than this absolute national sovereignty. For example, many believe that "state sovereignty" refers to those powers reserved to the states under the Tenth Amendment; however clearly this is not the same as the sovereignty of nations, since it expressly limits the powers of the states, while prohibiting certain powers to them as well.
Rather, the hopelessly naive, now talk of "dual sovereignty" or "divided sovereignty" with regard to the individual states-- i.e. they claim that "the Constitution determines state vs. federal powers." Of course, this ignores that the federal government is thus made the supreme judge of the Constitution;, and any competent attorney (or judge) can argue any law to mean virtually anything they wish: for as Madison and Jefferson wrote, this would give the federal government virtually unlimited power.
In other words, "state sovereignty" in the modern usage, is no sovereignty; since it cannot limit the federal government from doing as it wills. Rather, it only leaves the states with whatever "rights" that the federal government allows them to have; and under this definition, the federal government is the final word of law, while and any technical meaning of the written law or original intent is of no legal effect in limiting it.
The reason for this, is that the states were always sovereign nations, in modern definition of that term; specifically, they were popularly sovereign nations, wherein each state's people-- vs. the state (or federal) government-- were the supreme national authority over the state. Therefore the federal republic was an international union among them-- not a national union over them; and thus the people of any state could simply elect to "Nullify" any federal law, using their sovereign national authority against which this foreign law would not avail.
And indeed, this is exactly why the Jackson and Lincoln administrations found it necessary to revise history in order deny this sovereign-national status to the individual states; and thus they suppressed the fact of it from mainstream history to date, via suppressing the truth as well.
However in suppressing each state's national sovereignty, they likewise precluded ending it: for one cannot change, what he denies ever existed; and likewise, the federal government cannot claim legitimate federal authority via brute-force imperialism, for this would destroy its current claim of democratic origins to its claim of national authority, dating back to 1776.
Therefore, asserting the status of the states as sovereign nations, trumps federal/Union sovereignty over them; and conversely, failure to assert national sovereignty likewise concedes the federal claim of "divided sovereignty" to the states which again, is no sovereignty.
This brings up a puzzling question: i.e. why this uniform failure of the self-proclaimed "Libertarian movement" to assert state sovereignty as national sovereignty? Some will claim, for example, that "the Union was voluntary among the states," but ignore that the fact that this proposition requires that it was an international Union-- and that that each state was a sovereign nation unto itself; this failure reveals either a fear to say this outright, or else an outright ignorance of basic international law.
Certainly the "professional brinksmanship" in the Libertarian movement, is telling; for example, certain big names will claim that that the "Civil War" was wrong; however they won't state the one fact which would prove it beyond all doubt, by claiming each state was a sovereign nation, and that therefore it wasn't a civil war-- any more than Hitler's invasion of Poland, or Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. If every state was a sovereign nation, then it was no less a war of simple brute-force imperialism and totalitarian suppression. Indeed, even the claim of "ending slavery" was little more than the same Marxist-proletarian strawman-argument, by which socialists like Stalin claimed authority to deny the international sovereignty of the Baltic states, in the name of liberating the "Proletariat" of eastern Europe from the feudal "bourgeois capitalists" simply to mask similar imperialism and conquest.
Whatever the reason, the fact remains: anything less than national sovereignty, is no sovereignty; and therefore to assert anything less than national sovereignty for each state, thereby concedes the federal government's claim of national authority over them.
And this does nothing to limit the federal government in any effective sense; rather, these self-proclaimed "Libertarians" are hurting their own stated cause via this failure. In conclusion, therefore, the objective is clear: when it comes to protecting the states from federal excesses, it's either nations-- or nothing. Anything less, such as its current M.O. of simply faulting the federal government for "violating the Constitution," is simply wishful thinking.
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