There's a very silly little blog site called "No Treason" that seems to specialize in childish whining and belly aching about LRC. I've never heard of any of the people associated with the site despite the fact that I've been reading and writing libertarian literature for more than 25 years. A bunch of nobodies, in other words. They seem to be a gang of non-intellectual morons, to paraphrase the book with a similar title that I reviewed on LRC last week. One recent blurb criticizes me for writing that the Lincoln administration introduced the "first federal conscription law." This is wrong, they say. The writer points out that the Confederate government did it first. Interesting: I never knew the Confederate states were a part of the federal government and introduced the first "federal" conscription law! (Silly me; I thought the Confederates seceded from the federal government. Must be my public school background).
As lame as it is, this line of argument is also characteristic of John Majewski, Tom Palmer, and quite a few other libertarians (or "liberventionists"), and even a self-described anarchist or two, who seem to belive that it is illegitimate to write critically of Lincoln unless one also, at the same time, writes an entire book critical of Jefferson Davis and every single resident of the antebellum South. This whining, chattering, and complaining crowd -- which doesn't seem to have ever produced any "civil war" scholarship of its own -- seems much more interested in being able to strut around pretending to be holier-than-thou and morally pure than in learning about actual history or understanding how the Leviathan state got to be what it is.
If I wrote a book highly critical of Jefferson Davis, it's a sure bet that these people would not once demand that I also criticize Lincoln for the sake of intellectual balance. They should be thought of as recreational libertarians and not serious proponents of liberty.
