Ron Paul standing in front of a Confederate flag and telling an audience that the South was on the right side of the American Civil War

What’s this, you ask? On, nothing. It’s just a video of Ron Paul standing in front of a flag flown by traitors 150 years ago and telling his audience that the South was on the right side of the American Civil War.

At 1:25, Paul says that buying slaves’ freedom would have been a better way to free them than fighting a war over the issue. Does anyone actually believe that Ron Paul, were he a member of Congress in 1861, would have supported a plan for the United States government to spend taxpayer dollars to buy slaves, even if it were to free them? He’d abolish Medicare and Social Security, and he doesn’t support universal healthcare, but he’d support a federal government that would undoubtedly need to increase taxes and then spend that tax money on the purchase of southern slaves? No, he wouldn’t.

What’s stunning about Paul’s views on slavery and the Civil War is the fact that he calls himself a libertarian, and he talks more about personal liberty than any politician currently in office, but he would have been willing to accept idea that human beings could own other human beings. He’s arguing in this video that the North should have purchased the slaves of the South in order to free them, and that tells me that he would have been willing to accept that the northern government could legally purchase human beings. If one opposes slavery, and one believes that personal liberty is our primary, guiding principle, the idea that anyone (or any government) could purchase a human being should be unacceptable. To have supported the North’s purchase of human beings from the South would have been supporting slavery – the idea that one human being could be the property of another – as a legal concept.

Further along in the video, at 2:00, Paul he calls the Civil War a “loss of liberty.” For whom? Certainly not for the slaves who were freed. Were he a slave in 1861, I doubt that his libertarian ideals would have allowed him to argue that his freedom was for sale, to anyone, whether in the North or the South, for any reason. I doubt that he would have referred to the South as the victim, argued that the Civil War was a “loss of liberty”, or complained about “northern aggression”, a term that Southern apologists love to use.

Thank you to Dominion of New York for their article that brought this video to my attention.