2 by John Zmirak

Over at Taki's Top Drawer:
Banishing Nostalgian

Posted by John Zmirak on January 15, 2008

I’ve concentrated on the issues where she and I agree: We each think that the American experiment was exciting and worth a try. To establish a large, decentralized Republic where local liberties could flourish, the common man could hold onto his property and rise in the world, and the state would largely leave him alone. A place where power would mostly rest at the county level, a little more at the state, and least of all with the Feds. That model perfectly mirrors--of all things--the teaching of the Catholic Church called subsidiarity, which calls for such decentralism. The foreign policy laid out by George Washington seems modeled on Just War teaching. The separation of Church and State, while condemned by Catholics at first, in practice (until the court decisions of the 60s) did a good job of freeing the churches from corrupting dependence on the state--in some ways helping to recreate the independence of the Church which helped keep the Middle Ages so much freer than the Renaissance or the Endarkenment. Indeed, as Michael Davies (ruefully) observed, the Vatican’s teaching on religious liberty, enshrined at Vatican II, is American-inspired, and was pushed hardest by bishops from the U.S.

And so on. There’s a lot about this country’s history to love. She and I agree on that. That’s the reason each of us has been taking part in Ron Paul’s money bombs, to support the one prominent figure in our politics who actually supports the policies and principles upon which this country was founded.

That’s the America my beloved’s ancestors helped found, and while it may not be a benevolent, liberal Catholic monarchy, it’s a pretty good second choice. Or was, while it lasted. As Thomas DiLorenzo and others have documented, the Civil War spelled the end of real initiative on the state level. The artificial “crisis” of World War I, Robert Higgs explains in “Crisis and Leviathan,” helped nationalize large chunks of our economy--which were never given back. The same thing happened with each ensuring war. The income tax legalized a level of confiscation no feudal king would have attempted, and the draft made Everyman a pawn in the imperial games of presidents like Truman and Kennedy. How free are you, exactly, when the president can force you to go fight a proxy war in Korea or Vietnam, in the name of preserving “liberty” for the citizens of U.S-friendly dictatorships?

See also his post on nationalism--

On Bashing Nationalism
Posted by John Zmirak on January 14, 2008