Libertarians and the Confederacy

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

Jason Kuznicki

Jason Kuznicki was a senior fellow and the editor of Cato Books and of Cato Unbound, the Cato Institute’s online journal of debate. His first book, Technology and the End of Authority: What Is Government For? (Palgrave, 2017) surveys western political theory from a libertarian perspective. Kuznicki was an assistant editor of the Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. He also contributed a chapter to libertarianism.org’s Visions of Liberty. He earned a PhD 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.