humanities.philosophy.objectivism

On Mar 27, 11:04 am, Bill C
wrote:
> I thought I had the concept of "rights" down years ago, but I don't know
> what to make of a Tomas Jefferson reference to "states rights".
>
> While debating someone claiming the US Civil War was primarily over that
> rather than slavery,


By 1860 there was a long and continuing tradition in both the North
and the South that the Union was a voluntary union of sovereign
States, though such a concept was never spelled out in the
Constitution itself. "States rights" in this context was that the
U.S. government was entitled to only those powers delegated to it by
the Constitution: make war and treaties, receive and send ambassadors,
regulate immigration, resolve or prevent disputes among states in
inter-state commerce. However, the North continued with the old
British mercantilism economic strategy with respect to the South as
the producer of raw materials and primary source of excise taxes to
the point of the South providing some 75% of the revenue to the
federal government which then, by Northern Whig chicanery, was used to
fund "internal improvements" mostly in the North with little benefit
to the South which was forbidden to even build ships so it could trade
more directly with foreign countries without Northern-state
intermediaries.


> Then he sprang Jefferson's first
> inaugural address on me where he promotes "State governments in all their
> rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and
> the surest bulwarks against antirepublican tendencies".
>
> I see two plausible ways he would use the term like that:
>
> 1) He just gave in to common slang rather than put people to sleep with
> "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
> prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or
> to the people".
>


There's no "slang" about it. He says it explicitly and explains that
smaller, more local government is more responsive to the people.

> 2) He really believed that sovereign states literally have rights, and that
> US states were qualified as sovereign in his decentralized vision or
> government - where they were co-equal to the federal governments and equally
> empowered to resolve disputes between the two.
>


No. Bad interpretation. No "co-equal" about it. Separate and
sovereign but held in union by the powers and responsibilities of the
federal government for a "more perfect union" to benefit the states
and thereby the citizens of the states.

> Any insight into this?
>
> Also, does anyone know if Confederate States had the "right" to succeed. I
> know West Virginia voted itself out of Virginia and back into the US, but I
> think even Virginia later challenged that.


The Constitution forbids forming a state from within a state, as West
Virginia was created. I do not know how W.Va. was allowed to remain a
separate state even after the Civil War.