If you are a libertarian, go read this. NOW!! Multiple times until it soaks in your brain so deep the words fly around in your dreams and you go crazy from it. Logan Ferree has dealt authoritatively with the tendency among libertarian activists of — in misguided attempts at using appeal to history as an argument crutch — whitewashing the founding fathers and portraying the Constitution as if it were written by Murray Rothbard.

I know what you’re thinking: yeah, sometimes I mention the Constitution. Hell, I even capitalize the word. However, I don’t invoke it as an ideal. To me, it’s more of an indictment against the government that they don’t even bother to follow their own rules, yet they see fit to impose new ones on us. I’m talking standard breach of contract stuff here, no libertarian would’ve signed it anyway because of one simple thing that they don’t even hide from you in public government school: slavery. Our true intellectual ancestors weren’t the ones that left the legality of treating your fellow man like cattle solely on the basis of race sitting on the table for damn near a century, they’re the brave souls who at the time knew better and were NEVER afraid to say so. The tax resisters that said they wouldn’t provide a single cent to an entity that legitimized the breaking of an entire race of people. The ones that helped runaway slaves escape.

The ones that were opposing wars of expansion way back when the area under question was what we now call “Texas”.

For these people, blind worship was not an option. To maintain freedom, they couldn’t point at the Constitution, they had to go beyond. They were the “far-left” of the era. They heard the rhetoric about liberty and sought to correct the spots where the ones saying it contradicted themselves. When those people, the abolitionists, the tax resisters, the ones considered kooks by the establishment of the time said “freedom”, dammit, they MEANT it, and so do we.

Remember: you can’t truly learn from the past if you don’t admit the mistakes of it.