Fred C. Moulton wrote:
>
> At 10:35 PM 6/22/99 -0400, Christopher Maloney wrote:
> > Lincoln is decidedly one of my heroes -- a deep,
> >passionate thinker who was dedicated to doing the moral thing.
>
> Lincoln may have been dedicated to doing the moral thing but that does not
> mean that what he did was something that I would endorse. On the contrary
> I have deep misgivings about Lincoln. Under Lincoln the US suffered from the
> military draft, income taxes and the ever increasing size of the federal
> government. Further he refused to let the Confederacy leave the Union thus
> leading a very nasty war and the reason was not to free slaves but to preserve
> the Union.
But make no mistake: the war was about slavery. The reason the South
wanted to leave the Union was over conflicting opinions about whether
slavery should be extended into the territories. So here's the
conundrum:
should a subset of your population be free to the extent that they are
allowed to oppress and enslave another subset? I don't think so, but
it's
a hard question, and it comes up all the time.
> Read for example The Emancipation Proclamation; it did not free all of the
> slaves, it only applied to those slaves in areas which were in rebellion
> against
> the USA. According to the document the reason it was issued was as
> "a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion".
Yes, and was this a bad thing?
> I consider Lincoln to be extremely non-extropian in his actions.
Uh, oh -- I think I detect the embroyo of a thought police here.
>
> Fred Moulton
Here's a question I have for the group: does "extropian" necessarily mean "libertarian"? I read your extropian manifesto, and in section 5 (politics) it seemed like a pretty good description of the old US. I am inclined to be libertarian, when I am not thinking. But then I come to my senses, and realize that this world is full of way too many would-be oppressors in every possible form (especially economic) for any form of pure libertarianism to work.
-- Chris Maloney http://www.chrismaloney.com "Knowledge is good" -- Emil Faber