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Some modern opponents of a right to secession or self-determination invent a variety of reasons why secession was acceptable for Americans in the 1770s, but not in the 1860s. For example, historian Brooks Simpson in this column splits many hairs attempting to explain (unconvincingly) that the Declaration of Independence had nothing to do with secession.

Breaking up with a person you have known for more than thirty years, with whom you have participated in countless conferences and co-authored a couple of articles, even if only in the somewhat distant past, is nothing done lightly. It is even harder, if one shares with this person a common standing as a public intellectual and both our names are mentioned frequently in one breath as prominent students of the same teacher, Murray N. Rothbard, and as leading intellectual lights of the modern libertarian movement founded by Rothbard.

The clash between the Biden Administration and Texas spilled out into the open last week, when the US Supreme Court ruled that Federal authorities could remove razor wire that Texas Governor Greg Abbott had been installing along the border with Mexico to stop the millions of illegal immigrants from crossing over to the United States.

This time Abbott did not back down. Instead, he issued a statement declaring that “an invasion under Article I, Section 10, Clause 3” of the US Constitution is underway and invoking “Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself.”

Academic life today, and our culture generally, is beset by a “woke” madness. Marxist termites are attempting to destroy Western civilization. The problem isn’t confined to Critical Race Theory, the subject of an earlier column. It goes far beyond that. The rot is everywhere. Fortunately, those devoted to true academic freedom are resisting this onslaught against us. But we need someone to galvanize the struggle for academic freedom; someone to be the voice of our battle. We have that voice.

The idea of secession for some regions of the United States—sometimes simplistically called “national divorce”—has increasingly been mentioned as a way to deal with the apparent growing divide between what are crudely called “red states” and “blue states.” Polls suggest that perhaps a third of the American population “indicated a ‘willingness to secede’” 

Murray Rothbard called Richard Cantillon the “father of modern economics.” While that title is often given to Adam Smith, Rothbard suggested that all the good things in Smith were first discovered by Cantillon or other pre-Smithian economists and that virtually all of Smith’s original ideas were “a significant deterioration of economic thought.”