As I was reading the course description for History 575 (The Great Centralizer: Lincoln and the Growth of Statism) it reminded of the fact that Abraham Lincoln "ignored how most of the rest of the world ended slavery peacefully." As Ron Paul reminds us in the above video, instead of fighting the civil war...well...I'll just let Ron tell you.
Here is part of the transcript, excerpted from RonPaul.com:
D.L. Hugley: So you were against George Bush’s big spending too?
Ron Paul: Oh, absolutely. And certainly I was against his foreign policy and his violation of personal civil liberties. The privacy that he was invading and the secrecy of government… I didn’t like any of that. I am sort of an old-fashioned conservative that believes in the constitution.
And here the other part that I thoroughly enjoyed:
D.L. Hugley: Ron, you are too human to be a Republican. Now, I was on Bill Maher about a year and a half ago or so, and you came on by satellite, and you were explaining about the Civil War and how it didn’t need to be fought. And I was at first like, ‘Is he saying that it didn’t need to be fought?’ But when you explained it to me, I thought it was one of the most pragmatic, reasonable things I have ever heard a politician say.
Ron Paul: Well, you know the other nations in the West that had slavery all got rid of slavery without a civil war. The motivation behind the Civil War had more to do than just the slavery issue. So we lost 600,000 Americans and there is lot of residual, probably some left over today. There is still residual. So you could have, with a small fraction of the money and no deaths, just bought the slaves, you know, and freed the slaves. That’s what Britain and some other nations did and that just makes a lot more sense than fighting a war and killing each other. I know I don’t like this war as a solution to our problems.
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