Libertarians and the Confederacy

Libertarians should not support the Confederacy, because the Confederacy was not libertarian. Jason Kuznicki explains in this video.

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Jason Kuznicki

Jason Kuznicki has facilitated many of the Cato Institute’s international publishing and educational projects. He is editor of Cato Unbound, and his ongoing interests include censorship, church‐​state issues, and civil rights in the context of libertarian political theory. He was an Assistant Editor of Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Prior to working at the Cato Institute, he served as a Production Manager at the Congressional Research Service. Kuznicki earned a Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University in 2005, where his work was offered both a Fulbright Fellowship and a Chateaubriand Prize.

Why shouldn’t libertarians support the Confederacy? In short, because the Confederacy itself was not very libertarian.

In addition to being founded explicitly to protect the slave trade in America, the Confederacy conscripted soldiers, inflated its money supply during the war, and played host to many civil liberties violations. But that’s not to say that the Union was much better, as Jason Kuznicki explains.

Kuznicki is a Research Fellow at the Cato Institute and is editor of Cato Unbound.

Produced by Evan Banks.