The Fatal Conceit: The Myth of Limited Constitutional Government

0:00Our next speaker let Abraham Lincoln off the hook for a few years, and then he figured out what he had done, and poor Abe hasn't been the same ever since. He's an economics professor at Loyola College in Maryland, he's a senior faculty member Ludwig von Mises Institute, PhD from Virginia Tech, he's written 10 books, The Real Lincoln, How Capitalism Saved America, Lincoln Unmasked, Hamilton's Curse, and today he's going to talk about the fatal conceit, the myth of limited constitutional government. Please help me welcome Dr. Tom DiLorenzo.

0:48Thanks Doug and thanks for coming and leaving the pool to be here. You're supposed to laugh at that. It's a sick joke. For those of you who don't know, the title that I chose, The Fatal Conceit, was the title of Friedrich Hayek's last book, and it was about, the fatal conceit was the conceit that central planning could work, socialism and central planning could work, but there's another fatal conceit, and that is the conceit that government can be limited by a constitution, and I've increasingly become sort of a used, that so many conservatives, in particular, spend their lives, their whole lives, advocating if only we could enforce the Constitution, things would be better.

1:35But they never seem to spend a minute thinking of, well, how could this happen? How could we get the Constitution to be enforced? And they usually, their answer is usually, well, elect Supreme Court judges that are like us. Well, that hasn't worked too well, has it? I don't think it has worked too well. And that was never, ever the design of the founding fathers. In fact, most of the founders thought it was an absurd idea that you could ever trust any arm of the federal government to enforce the limits on its own powers, whether it's the judiciary or anywhere else. If this Constitution was ever to be enforced and limiting government, it would have to be the people that enforce, the people themselves, particularly the people themselves organized at the state and local level and political communities.

2:27That was always the original design of Jefferson in particular. And so the idea of putting the federal government in charge of the limits on its own power is really the classic case of putting the fox in charge of the hen house. and I'm going to start off in talking about my speech here by making a very politically incorrect statement and that I'm going to quote John C. Calhoun, okay, don't panic. Calhoun is a Calhoun a lot of you know was a vice president of the United States, secretary of war, he was a senator from the state of South Carolina and he was also one of Murray Rothbard's favorite political philosophers and he He wrote a great book, it's online now and it's for sale in various places, Liberty Fund sells it, it's called A Disquisition on Government and this was published in 1850, the year he died and it's this book that Rothbard quoted a lot all throughout his career because it was really a classic statement of the Jeffersonian states' rights position on the Constitution

3:34and on the role of government in society. So that Calhoun was really sort of the water carrier. He was the successor to Jefferson in terms of political philosophy. That's why the right-wing statists, who call themselves neoconservatives, always slander Calhoun, because that way they can criticize Jefferson's Small Government Decentralized State's Rights Position without actually attacking Thomas Jefferson. That would not be politically advisable because Jefferson is such an icon. But Calhoun is not an icon, he was a southerner. What more do you need to say, after all?

4:20And so, the left-wing statists, who are known as left-wing statists, do the same thing. Do the same thing. They just, you know, he lived in South Carolina. They had slaves in South Carolina. Well, they had slaves in New York City for 300 years. That doesn't mean we should ignore everything every political figure in New York City ever said. Although I would like Michael Bloomberg to shut the hell up. He's... Leave my salt alone. But I'm gonna read a few things from Calhoun. You know, what did he say about the Constitution? Well, here's one thing he said. He said, and I'm quoting, It is an error to believe that a written constitution alone is sufficient of itself without the aid of any organism except such as necessary to separate its several departments and render them independent of each other to counteract the tendency of the numerical majority to oppression and abuse of power.

5:21He said it is a great mistake to suppose that the mere insertion of provisions to restrict and Limit the Powers of the Government without investing for whose protection they are inserted with the means of enforcing their observance will be sufficient to prevent the major and dominant party from abusing its powers. So he's saying what I said at the beginning, that it's folly to think that this constitution could ever be enforced unless the people whose liberties are supposed to be protected by by this Constitution are the ones enforcing it, not the government. That is ridiculous to expect that to occur. These men were not naive about government, for goodness sake.

6:08And he goes on to say, the party in possession of government will always be opposed to any and all restrictions on its powers. They will have no need of these restrictions and would come in time to regard these limitations as Unnecessary and Improper Restraints and Endeavor to Elude Them. This is in 1850, and of course this is all totally true, and one more thing I'll read. He said it was folly, sheer folly, to suppose that the party in possession of the ballot box and the physical force of the country, the military force, could be successfully resisted by an appeal to reason, truth, justice, or the obligations imposed by the constant and then finally he predicted that the restrictions of government power would ultimately be annulled and the government would be converted into one of unlimited powers.

7:05He was absolutely right of course and that's been true for a long, long time and of course just to see how unlimited government is nowadays, One thing that sticks in my mind was how Bill Clinton, when he was president, gave up on a big tax increase because his Treasury Secretary told him it would have a very bad effect on the bond market and Clinton did not want to run for re-election during a recession and so he gave up on it. but this administration now they don't care about that they just they just run a full bore ahead to adopt as much socialism as they can adopt while they're in there before they get kicked out and they don't seem to have any care at all for the effects in the economy it's almost as though they're they're purposely trying to destroy the American economy with with the things that they're doing and proposing to do and not almost they are they are and so there are no

7:59and more limitations, that is certainly true. And what this was, what Calhoun was talking about is his rendition of libertarian class analysis, which is different than Marxian class analysis. And this goes back a long, long way, several hundred years, long before Calhoun's time. And the two classes that were in conflict were the net tax payers, people who paid more in tax than they got in benefits from government, and what he called net tax consumers, People who got more from government, mostly government employees, then they paid in taxes. And he predicted that the tax eaters or the tax consumers would ultimately overpower the taxpayers. And of course, that's a situation we've been in for a long, long time in the United States.

8:46And so this was libertarian class theory that goes way back to the French physiocrats in Europe. This is not even a Jeffersonian idea. This is before Jefferson. And so this whole book, as I said, was a classic statement of the Jeffersonian states' rights position on the Constitution. I should say a restatement. And so where did Calhoun get these ideas anyway? Well, he was a student of history, of politics. He understood the Jeffersonian position. And of course, he was a politician. He was in politics his whole life, and so he knew what he was talking about and he knew that there were a lot of sworn enemies of constitutional limitations in the American government from the very beginning and so the second part of what I'm going to have to say here is I'm going to talk about how at the beginning of the American founding there were the Jeffersonians who were the strict constructionists, for the most part, who wanted to use the Constitution as a way to protect the American people.

9:52as a way of enforcing limits on governmental power. And then there were the Hamiltonians, and Hamilton had a totally different view of the Constitution than Jefferson. Hamilton's view was that the Constitution could be a potential rubber stamp on anything the state ever wanted to do as long as it was properly interpreted by clever, Ivy League-trained lawyers like Alexander Hamilton. And that was his position, a rubber stamp. And in my book, Hamilton's Curse, I quote the historian Clinton Rossiter, who wrote a whole book on Hamilton and the Constitution, as saying that and praising it. He's saying this is a great thing, that the words of the Constitution can be and have been twisted so that it's essentially a rubber stamp.

10:40To give you an example of what a good job the Hamiltonians have done, that Andy Napolitano in his book, The Constitution in Exile, mentions that between 1937 and 1995, the Supreme Court did not strike down a single piece of federal legislation as being unconstitutional. So what does that mean? That means between 1937 and 1995, all the Congresses and all the Presidents were strict constructionists like Thomas Jefferson. If everything was constitutional, or alternatively, they were Hamiltonians. and that they twisted the words of the Commerce Clause and the General Welfare Clause and other clauses so badly out of shape that the Constitution was used as a rubber stamp on everything.

11:32So one of those interpretations has to be true and I think the Hamiltonian interpretation is true. and this took a long time to happen this didn't just and it took the mighty efforts of a lot of famous people to subvert the Constitution but it started from the very beginning as Calhoun knew and as he wrote about in his book at the really at the very beginning you know as soon as the Constitution was finished Hamilton himself condemned it as he called it a frail and worthless This was Fabric, because he didn't get his way. He was the foremost proponent of a Constitutional Convention. For seven years he lobbied for a Constitutional Convention to supposedly revise our first Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, and of course they didn't revise the Articles, they threw them out altogether.

12:29And so Hamilton laid out his plan at the Constitutional Convention, and his plan was for a permanent President, who would appoint all the governors, who would have veto power over all state legislation. And so the people of the states would have had nothing whatsoever to do with the central government. There was none of this 10th Amendment business with the Hamiltonians. They didn't want that. They didn't, you know, the 10th Amendment says that there are these few and well-defined powers that are delegated to the central government for the benefit of the states, for the benefit of the citizens of the states. and so on. That's why these powers are being delegated. But everything else is the prerogative of the citizens and the states. That's what the 10th Amendment was. So Hamilton was certainly opposed to that. He wanted the central government to be in charge of everything.

13:17But he didn't get his way, of course. The government did become a little more centralized, but Hamilton certainly didn't get his way. And so he condemned the whole thing. He left the Constitutional Convention, went back to huddle, presumably with his paymasters in New York City, like Robert Morris, and then condemned the whole thing as a frail and worthless fabric. And then after the Constitution was a done deal, Hamilton immediately went to work subverting it the best he could. How did he do this? Hamilton was a brilliant man. He was a lawyer, a brilliant lawyer, and he was a workaholic. He was a famous workaholic, and it's hard to beat that combination of extreme brilliance Hamilton set out to remold the Constitution into an instrument of national supremacy.

14:27How did he set out to remold the Constitution? Not by proposing amendments to it, by thinking up lawyerly subterfuges that could be used by judges, presumably, to reinterpret the plain language of the Constitution in order to destroy the limits on government that were in the Constitution. That's what he did. That's what he meant by this. And so how did he do that? Well, the first thing he did was in his big debate with Jefferson over the constitutionality of a National Bank, the Bank of the United States, which was Hamilton's Bank. This is a classic statement of Jefferson's strict constructionist views, where he essentially said there's nothing in the Constitution that allows this.

15:12In fact, the Constitutional Convention debated whether the government should have a national bank and they rejected it. And that would seem to be pretty strong evidence that the idea of a bank run by politicians out of the nation's capital was not only a bad idea, but unconstitutional. They considered it at the convention and rejected it. Hamilton came back and essentially said, you need to read between the lines of the Constitution. There are implied powers there. And so it was Hamilton who invented the idea of implied and not expressed powers of the Constitution. And of course, once you go down that road, once that's accepted, then there's no limit to the powers. The only limit is the imaginations of politicians, and you've got a totalitarian government if you allow that sort of thing to happen, which we have.

16:04And Jefferson, he didn't actually say this, but the essence of what he said in response was, I've read between the lines and there's only blank space there, and so that was their argument. But we did get the Bank of the United States, but I'm not going to talk about that, but that's where he invented this bad idea. And then the second thing Hamilton did in a public speech, even before the Constitution was ratified, this was in a speech in New York State where he was lobbying to get the Constitution ratified, he said this, he said, see this was a speech on June 29th, 1787, the states are merely artificial beings and were never sovereign, he said, they were never sovereign, and Artificial Beings, and he went on to say that it was the nation that created the states, meaning the central government, not the other way around. The states didn't create the central government.

16:58But of course, if you look at the Constitution itself, Article 7 explains that this document is to be ratified by the states, by nine of the thirteen states. Why? Well, because they were the sovereigns, that's why. Why would they be called on to ratify the Constitution of the Constitution if they didn't have the sovereign power over the constitution, which created the powers of the central government. Of course they were sovereign. So he did those two things, the implied powers idea and the idea that the citizens of the states were never sovereign over their own government. Those bad ideas were put into play by Alexander Hamilton, and they were repeated for the next 75 years by the advocates of national supremacy, of sort of a dictatorial monarchy, essentially, with a permanent president, as Hamilton wanted.

17:52They never gave up on that idea. They lost at the convention, but they never gave up on that idea. And Hamilton also was the first, as far as I can tell, to pervert the general welfare and commerce clauses. And a lot of you are familiar with how the commerce clause of the Constitution has been twisted to justify all sorts of government activity that was not really meant to be the purview of the central government. Hamilton's original argument goes something like this. While the Constitution does give the central government the right to regulate trade between the states, because they wanted to advocate, they wanted to have free trade between the states. And Hamilton argued that, well, if the government can regulate trade between the states, well, surely everything that goes on within the states, producing, manufacturing goods and so forth, eventually leads to interstate commerce because people will sell some of this stuff across state lines.

18:52Therefore, if the government has the right to regulate interstate trade, It should also have the right to regulate intra-state trade, and that was his argument for essentially unlimited government regulation of everything, of everything, because intra-state trade, all trade, and of course that has been carried out a thousand times over to justify everything. One of Hamilton's helpers in subverting the Constitution, and these are all the people that Calhoun was talking about in his 1850 book. Even if he didn't mention them in the passages that I read, this had to be who he had in mind. John Marshall was one of his assistants. Marshall was slavishly devoted to Hamilton and Hamilton's ideas about government.

19:42And when Marshall declared in Marbury versus Madison that something called judicial review would take place. This, of course, is nowhere in the Constitution. He just made this up out of thin air. There was nothing in the Constitution that allowed the Supreme Court to be the arbiter of constitutionality. He essentially meant that he, John Marshall, the Chief Justice, would decide for everybody what's constitutional and what's not. And of course, like I said, that's nowhere in the Constitution. And it wasn't until after the Civil War, which those of you who have read some My Lincoln Articles know I usually call the war to prevent southern independence. It wasn't until then that we had this judicial dictatorship really put into place, because prior to that, presidents would look at Supreme Court decisions and say essentially, thank you for your opinion, but mine is different, and then probably in private they'd say, na-na-na-na-na, something like that.

20:40Andrew Jackson was famous for that. When Marshall himself said the Bank of the United States is constitutional, Jackson responded by essentially saying, so what? He said, my view is different. He had a very eloquent response actually, but the essence of it was, thank you for your opinion, but my opinion is different. And we have a system of government here where we have co-equal branches. We have the executive branch, the congressional branch, and the judicial branch, and you, Mr. Marshall, are just one branch, you're the judicial branch. And my view of the Constitution is just as valid as yours. That was the essence of what Andrew Jackson said. Another decision that Jackson responded to, not related to the bank, he said Mr. Marshall has made his decision and now let him try to enforce it.

21:30And this was not only Andrew Jackson, there were other presidents, the state governments, Tom Woods is going to talk about this next, about how state governments for the whole The whole period prior to the war to prevent southern independence, north and south, all the states would take it upon themselves to declare that they were going to nullify federal laws that they thought were unconstitutional. So not only did a lot of Americans believe that constitutionality was the responsibility of the court, the president, the congress, but also the citizens of the states at the same time. Martin vs. Hunters-Lee See, John Marshall wrote The Opinion on The Federal Government had the right to veto state court decisions, and this is nowhere in the Constitution either.

22:32He just declared this to be a new power that he, John Marshall, the Chief Justice, would have to veto the state court decisions. Another thing he did in trying to codify Hamilton's ideas into the law was he made up the theory that the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution makes the Constitution the supreme law of the land over everyone and everything, but it doesn't. All the Supremacy Clause says that those specific powers delegated to the central government by the states in Article 1, Section 8, the central government is supreme over the states in those. But then the Tenth Amendment says everything else is the prerogative of the citizens in the states. It doesn't make the central government the supreme dictator over all of us and over all the states.

23:24That's been the thinking for many, many years. In fact, the Obama administration recently threw that out in their argument with Arizona over immigration laws, the supremacy clause, you know, what do you mean Arizona law? We can't have state laws, you know, the federal government is supreme over everything. And so you have these people in the Obama administration just echoing Hamilton and his buddy John Marshall. When I first started writing about this, some articles on the Internet, by the way, I had an email from a law student at New York University who thanked me for criticizing Hamilton and he said, I'm just sick of sitting here in Nadine Strossen's class at NYU Law School where she goes on and on and on every day praising the Hamiltonian interpretation of the Constitution and which he as a libertarian understood was all subversive, it was all, that's what you learn when you go to law school and you take a course in constitutional law, you learn the history of all the clever arguments that have been used to undermine constitutional

24:27limits on government. You don't study the actual constitution, you study the subterfuge of the constitution, even at prestigious schools like NYU. And so, another thing that Marshall did in another decision is he repeated Hamilton's bogus theory of the American founding. He said this, in the name of the people, the federal government claimed the right to legitimately control all individuals or governments within the American territory, and it sounds like Soviet-style totalitarianism, you know, control, do you mean control, enslave all individuals and governments within American territory? The author of Hamilton's Helpers was Justice Joseph Story, a famous Supreme Court justice who wrote a very famous book called Commentaries on the Constitution, and Clinton Rossiter, who I mentioned, who wrote the book on Hamilton and the Constitution, he said this book should have been called Commentaries on Alexander Hamilton's Commentaries on the Constitution, because it was essentially a big long-winded repetition of Hamilton's superstition.

25:37This is essentially what most Americans for the last seven or eight or nine or ten generations have been taught about the Constitution, Hamilton's superstitions about the Constitution. Here's what Rossiter said about Hamilton. He construed the powers of Congress liberally, and he upheld the supremacy of the nation, which means the central government or monopolistic governments, and he says, stories commentaries, this book Commentaries and the Constitution, quote, provided a political roadmap for the legal professions elite, or at least among the part of it educated in the north during the middle years of the 19th century, end quote.

26:24So this provided the political roadmap essentially for the New England Ivy League political elite. How many members of the current U.S. Supreme Court are not members of the New England Ivy League political elite? Maybe one or two? One? Maybe Scalia? I don't think... Clarence Thomas went to Yale, you can count them, but it seems as though these people knew what they were talking about. And Story's famous, his famous book, his commentary's book, is filled with phony history and illogic. Here's one of the things he says, quote, it is heresy to maintain that a party to a compact has a right to revoke the compact.

27:12So once you enter into any compact, you have no right to revoke that compact. The unwritten second sentence there is that we will shoot you if you try to do it. If you're talking about the compact creating the United States government, but of course, the Articles of Confederation, he was referring to the Articles of Confederation, which was a compact, which was revoked, they did revoke it, his people revoked it, his fellow nationalists revoke the Articles of Confederation. He also said this, secession of a single state would mean dissolution of the government, Well, eleven southern states seceded in 1860 and 1861, and the federal government proceeded to field the largest and best equipped army in the history of the world for four years after that.

28:01That's not what I would call dissolution of the government. The government would have been just different. It would have been smaller. It would have been dissolved. The US government wouldn't have disappeared. And Abe Lincoln would have vanished like Captain Kirk called him back up to the Spaceship Enterprise. They still would have had their government in Washington, D.C. But this was long before the Civil War that Story was saying this. Story did make an honest statement here. He said that the original compact of society, meaning American society, in no instance has has ever been formally expressed at the first institution of a state. What he's saying here is that there was never any, really, a voluntary state.

28:51He said this is a fanciful theory, the social contract theory of the state where citizens get together and voluntarily agree to have a state that will coerce them in certain ways. This never actually happened. It's a nice theory, but it never actually happened. But then he goes on to say, nevertheless, everyone and every part should pay obedience to the will of the whole. So we never agreed to this state, but we nevertheless should pay obedience to something called the will of the whole. And then he goes on to say, who is to define this will? Well, the government, of course. People like Joseph Story on the Supreme Court, that's who will define for us what our will is. And of course the whole idea of a general will is nonsense. We all have our individual preferences and likes and dislikes. There's no way you can't conglomerate a whole country into one will of any kind. That, by the way, is why in his famous book, The Road to Serfdom,

29:52Friedrich Hayek wrote that this whole language of general welfare, the common good, is really is a recipe for totalitarianism because anyone who purports to know what is in the minds of millions of people and is in their good or their general welfare is someone who just wants to use the coercive powers of the state to do what they want to do in the name of the common good, the general welfare. And so Hayek didn't really distinguish between the general welfare clause of the constitution and say the language of Germany and Italy in the 1930s that were the common good before the private good was the essence of fascism as the same thing and it's pretty much the same idea if you read the Road to Serfdom. And so what he is saying here, what Joseph's story is saying here, this is an expression of the French Jacobin philosophy that comes from Rousseau that there is some sort of general will in the minds of the ruling elite

30:49and that ruling elite has the right, therefore, to use the power of the state, the military power of the state, to enforce their version of the general will. That's not the American view of government, of the Constitution. That's the French Jacobin view of government. And ironically, it's Jefferson who has been smeared as being too friendly toward the French during their revolution, when it was really his nemesis, Hamilton, whose ideas were pure Jacobin ideas, as far as I'm concerned. So how is government to be constrained? How is this constitution to be enforced according to Joseph Story? Well, he presents the elementary schoolish view that the appropriate response to governmental oppression should be quote, the proper tribunals constituted by the government.

31:36Elections, things like that, hasn't really worked out that well. He says, appeal to the good sense and integrity and justice of the majority of the people. A story also repeated John Marshall's fable that the Supremacy Clause makes the central government supreme in everything. Another helper, another of the helpers of Hamilton was Daniel Webster. Daniel Webster, and he was in a famous debate in the United States Senate with Senator Robert Hayne of South Carolina, and according to the members of the Senate and the media of the time, Hayne won the debate, hands down, but history has been rewritten since the nationalists eventually won this political war.

32:29It's been rewritten to say that Webster won the debate, and he must have been a big The Big Bag of Hot Air, Daniel Webster. I read through these whole debates word by word, and it's a real struggle, but the advocates of national power, centralized power, in academe, who discussed this debate between Hayne and Webster, they always quote one line that Webster said about union and liberty forever, and that is supposed to be a substitute for an analysis of the substance of what he was actually saying here, which I don't think it was. The Constitution of the United States confers on the government itself the power of deciding ultimately and conclusively upon the extent of its own authority.

33:30That's what Daniel Webster said. Well, no, it does not. John Marshall may have wished it did, but it does not. Senator John Taylor of Virginia, who wrote a book about the Constitutional Convention based largely on notes taken by Robert Yates, the New York Supreme Court Chief Justice who was there, and they were published posthumously by Yates' widow, as was his book. The Constitution never could have designed to destroy liberty by investing five or six men installed for life with the power of regulating the constitutional rights of all political departments.

34:21Think about that. The founders fought this revolution against the British Empire and then they're going A Constitution that would save them, presumably, from the evils of an empire and of a mercantilist empire and it's a revolution for liberty, not equality like the French Revolution. How are they going to defend liberty? Well, let's get five government lawyers with lifetime tenure and let them decide for everybody. How stupid would you have to be to believe that? But that's what all Americans mostly believe these days, when they sort of, they bow down to the black-robed deities of the Supreme Court. Okay, yes, masters, we will obey. That was not always the case, that was not always the case.

35:06Taylor was a Jeffersonian, and of course, the Jeffersonians thought it was ridiculous to think of that. In fact, they always predicted that if the day ever came Webster also presented a totally false scenario. One of two things is true. Either the laws of the Union are beyond the discretion and beyond the control of the states, or else we have no constitution of general government. So, either the people of the states have nothing whatsoever to do with the central government's powers, or we just have no central government. We can't have central government.

35:57And of course, some of you are snickering. This is Daniel Webster. Weren't you all taught to revere Daniel Webster when you were in elementary school, saying these things? Well, this is a totally false scenario. I don't want to steal Tom Woods' thunder, But what Webster was referring to is the fact that everyone in the country, everyone, every state in the country, disagreed with this during his time. There were states, his own state, Massachusetts, was nullifying the fugitive slave law. Ohio nullified the Bank of the United States. They refused to allow the Bank of the United States to operate within its borders. They passed a law and they imposed a tax of $100,000 in the 1820s on the Bank of the United States.

36:44The first central bank to try to drive it into bankruptcy. The citizens of the states everywhere disagreed with Daniel Webster. In fact, they thought the only way we could have a general government that would protect our liberty was if the people could constrain it and tame it with such things as nullification and secession and the right of secession. After all, America was created by a war of secession from the British Empire. How could you deny that Americans had Another thing that he says, he repeats the line that the government was a national government and not created by the states, he says the Constitution creates a popular government erected by the people. It is not a creature of the state governments.

37:32Like I said, read Article 7 of the Constitution where it says, yeah, it is a creature of the state governments. And remember, this is a diatribe on the Constitution by Daniel Webster. And then he says this, who shall interpret the people's will? Guess what his answer is? He said, quote, the government itself. There's that French Jacobin dictatorial mindset again. Here's one thing that really laid the ideological groundwork for Abraham Lincoln's invasion of the southern states. It was Webster's redefinition of treason in the Constitution. If you want to know what treason is, read Article 3, Section 3 of the United States Constitution. Here's what it says, quote, treason against the United States, keep in mind, I'm interrupting myself here, in all the founding documents, when the words United States are in them, it's in the plural, the states are.

38:29It's not the United States government is, the states are, meaning the independent states The States are united in creating this central government for their mutual benefit. That's always the meaning. Articles of Confederation, Declaration of Independence, Constitution, all in the plural. And so I'll start over again. Treason against the United States shall consist in levying war against them, the States, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. So, waging war against the states is what is treason under the plain language of the U.S. Constitution. That's why Abraham Lincoln's invasion of the southern states was the very definition of treason under the Constitution. There's no way anyone could ever deny that.

39:15Waging war against the states. What was the Civil War? It was the central government waging How did Webster redefine treason? He redefined treason as meaning the opposite of that. Resisting an invasion of the federal government is treason. This is what he said, quote, to resist by force the execution of a federal law generally is treason, end quote. And he didn't say Constitutional Federal Law. He said federal law, any federal law. He didn't put any qualifiers in there. So presumably no matter how oppressive and how tyrannical the federal government would be, resisting it, and he didn't say violent resistant either.

40:02He said resisting, we did say resisting by force, but he didn't really define what he meant by force. That's treason. Well, that's bogus, that's nowhere in the Constitution. In fact, it's the exact opposite of what's in the Constitution. So how are we to protect ourselves from oppression, according to Daniel Webster? Well, quote, trust in the efficacy of frequent elections. What are you laughing at? Then he also said, quote, trust in the judicial power. Trust in the Ivy League, New England Ivy League trained judges, and we'll be fine. Remember what I said from 1937 to 1995, according to Judge Napolitano and others, other legal scholars that I've read that said this, not one federal law was ruled unconstitutional.

40:55Everything was rubber-stamped. In fact, those of you who have studied the Great Depression in the New Deal know that there were quite a few big Supreme Court cases that simply overturned ideas. The Minimum Wage Law was held to be unconstitutional several years before the Supreme Court changed over new personnel and they discovered that it was constitutional after all. A lot of that went on in the 1930s. I think that's why Napolitano picked 1937 because that's when it all started. Now, all of this rhetoric, what this is, these ideas are all the nationalist interpretation of the Constitution. This is 50 years of legal rhetoric that was designed to destroy the Jeffersonian interpretation of the Constitution, to overthrow the Jeffersonian interpretation of the Constitution so that the government could be much more centralized, was much more powerful and essentially unlimited in its powers.

42:02That was the original design of the Hamiltonians once the revolution was over. But the people did not accept this. After Jefferson was elected, the New England Federalists plotted for 10 years to secede. They actually held a convention in Hartford, Connecticut in the year 1814 to vote up or down on secession on whether they would create their own country in New England. They voted against it, but for 10 years they debated it. There's several big books on this. By the 1850s there was a secession movement in the middle Atlantic states. The middle states were generally considered Maryland, Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware. There's a whole book on it called The Secession Movement in the Middle States.

42:47And again, all the people in these states assumed that they had a right of secession. They didn't buy the nationalist interpretation of the Constitution. Abolitionists, a lot of abolitionists from the northern states wanted to secede because they didn't want to be a part of slavery. The famous abolitionist journal by William Lloyd Garrison, I think the slogan was no constitution with death or something like that, no covenant with death. and that meant, that was a secessionist statement. He advocated the northern states seceding and I think he probably was smart enough to know that if he did that, the fugitive slave law would have become defunct, that is this was a law that was passed in 1850 that put a bounty, a federal government bounty on runaway slaves. I think Garrison was smart enough to know that if the northern states formed their own country, then this law would be defunct and if a slave In the 1960s, Abraham Lincoln escaped into, say, Pennsylvania, he would no longer have a federal bounty on his head, he would be free, that's why the Underground Railroad ended up in Canada, and Abe Lincoln, by the way, was a very firm supporter of the Fugitive Slave Act, if you just read his speeches, but I think Garrison was smart enough to understand that, and so people all over the country didn't buy this until the 1860s, and as I said, if you would ever read Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address,

44:21He said the states were never sovereign, therefore they have no right to secede. That's his basic argument. When I was in a debate years ago with a well-known neocon Lincoln idolater, he made a reference to Hitler, as he always does, with his debating opponents. And so what I did is, and of course he tried to associate me with Hitler somehow. and so but so what I did anyway I went back and I wrote an article you know I had actually read Mein Kampf as a college student and I don't know how I ever remembered this but it kind of popped in my head that when I was suffering being forced to read Mein Kampf as a sophomore in college there was a whole chapter on states rights and state sovereignty in Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler and Adolf Hitler actually quoted Abe Lincoln's first inaugural address When he says the union wasn't created by the states, the union created the states, and Hitler here was making his case for the abolition of federalism, for the abolition

45:28of state sovereignty, state rights, because he was making his case for the centralization of all power in Berlin, and he was using Abraham Lincoln as his role model in Mein Kampf. So this nationalist interpretation of the Constitution didn't really play until the in the 1860s, but of course it was all put in place at gunpoint during the war to prevent southern independence and ever since then, that's what Americans have been taught. Americans have been taught this false nationalist history, these superstitions about the American founding that say that you, the people of the sovereign states, have no right to challenge the supremacy of the Federal Government, that we're all slaves to Washington, D.C. and will be forever.

46:15And the only way that will ever change is if we have the courage to confront our own history and realize that we've been sold the bill of goods about our own history. And so one way of doing that, that I would recommend, is for all of you to go out and buy my books, The Real Lincoln, Lincoln Unmasked and Hamilton's Curse, and also Tom Woods's This New Book, Nullification, and he's our next speaker and that's what he's going to talk about and so in your journey to educate yourself about real American history, you should stick around for our next speaker, Tom Woods, and that's about all I have to say for now.