boholikeu said:
To American conservatives "freedom" only means "don't tell me what I can/can't do with my money". Everything else is essentially fair game.
Yes, but the ramifications of that...
The people who wrote the Constitution (I refuse to call them "founding fathers". Americans overrate their Constitution and seem to think it's a sacred text. That needs to stop) were pretty good at following that logic to its reasonable conclusion: if property is to be protected and people are free to do what they want with their property, then they must all be born equal (so no more liberty to trade for nobility than for peasants) and law must apply equally to all.
How they missed that "all" meant "every human in existance, even if they're female or black" I honestly don't know, but the core of it was certainly there, and it was sound.
The debate these days is not about that, though. It's about whether corporations are property or a government.
They are as big as many governments and they are in a position of power over individual people similar to that of a government, but they don't own land, so do we regulate them with checks and balances, like we do with public corporations or do we give them more freedom as we do with individuals?
And, of course, the US Constitution doesn't apply to that debate at all. They clearly need to scrap it entirely and write a new one.
But back in the day? Yeah, it was about states vs. federal government, but it clearly also was about individual freedom of people vs individual freedom of money in that it decided whether you could own other people or not. I don't see how a conservative from the XXIst century could argue that the south was on the right side there. Ultimately, it was a war between an old regime serfdom-based economic and political model versus a modern wages-and-taxes based model. Even the most rabid anti-federal conservative must understand that the model of the south was outdated even then and doesn't make a lick of sense today.
Facing facts, the only reason anybody would say what the OP posted here is a romantic, symbolic sense of nostalgia, not political support.
Right?
