There wasn't really any stimulus

David Leohnhardt makes the case.

I don't know why this is so hard for people to understand. Yet we still hear "we tried Keynesian stimulus and look - nothing happened". Explain to me precisely what "Keynesian stimulus we tried". The Feds filled a hole that the states were digging - once you net that out there was very little stimulus to speak of.

I'm making essentially the same point in an opinion piece I'm sending in to the Washington Post to coincide with the release of the second quarter GDP statistics. If it doesn't make it through, I'll post it here.

This really isn't that hard. We've done some monetary policy, although as many people point out the monetary environment was still contractionary, not expansionary. Fiscal policy was more or less a flat line. That's the policy environment, and the macroeconomic response is pretty much what I would have expected from that sort of policy environment.

Yglesias's Lynching Statistics

Yglesias had a post up yesterday on a really strange attempt by the conservative magazine American Spectator to try to discredit Shirley Sherrod by arguing that her relative, Bobby Hall, was not lynched because he was not hung (he was beaten to death). Yglesias goes through the history of lynching, and some of the reports on the incident, and demonstrates quite clearly that lynching doesn't necessarily mean "hanging", it simply means mob justice before a trial can take place. It often implies hanging, but the act is not required. Why the American Spectator would try to take a stand on this is a worthwhile question for any subscribers to that publication to ask. But I was also intrigued by the graphic that Yglesias included from the Truman administration's "To Secure These Rights" report:



One thing that caught my eye was how many of the early lynchings were of whites. For the first ten years, about half the incidents involved whites, and then very quickly the vast majority were lynchings of blacks. What happened here? One of the books I rescued from the Urban Institute's library before it closed up was the 1966 follow up report on civil rights titled "To Fulfill These Rights", but this report didn't even mention lynching (which I suppose is in and of itself a sign of some progress). I also consulted DuBois's 1915 article on lynching and he doesn't mention the phenomenon of white lynching. I have three theories for what's going on here. If anyone has any way of arbitrating between the theories or has any additional theories I'd be interested in hearing about it:
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1. The end of Reconstruction marked the beginning of the Jim Crow era. The late 1870s and early 1880s were a time of institution building at the state and local level; new institutions emerged to control blacks now that the old laws and customs of chattel slavery and the protective cover of the Union Army were both gone. In 1875 or so, while the United States was not a pleasant place for blacks, it was not yet the Jim Crow world that would emerge. I know specifically of former Confederate officer William Mahone, who (at least initially) made political inclusion of blacks a priority in Virginia. But as the institutions of Jim Crow began to emerge this sort of position became untenable for whites, and men like Mahone very quickly began to relent. So - perhaps white lynchings in the 1880s, which quickly dropped off afterwards, were a form of institutional enforcement. Whites were lynched early on for the same reason that blacks were: they weren't sufficiently deferential to white privilege. Perhaps a few tried to defend blacks during lynchings and suffered the same fate. As the institution matured, whites "learned their place" as it were, and didn't make any attempts to challenge a system that, after all, provided them with privileges. It seems like a reasonable explanation.
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2. Lynchings became racialized. There are a lot of things in our society that are thought of as "black things" or "white things". Crime and punishment is no different. The South has always been a violent place, and its not particularly surprising that mob justice was meted out to whites as well as blacks. But when lynching became a specific tool of Jim Crow, it became a "black punishment". Part of keeping the disparity between whites and blacks intact was to make sure that whites weren't subjected to "black punishments". Violent outbursts are racially categorized - you don't hear that much about black duels and you don't hear that much about white lynchings. You can see this trend in servitude and slavery itself in the very early South. Bound servitude was initially a fate of both whites and blacks. But very quickly chattel slavery was distinguished as an institution for blacks alone. In a sense this explanation, like the first one, is very much an "institutional emergence" explanation.
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3. Bad statistics. You can't work with data of varying quality every day and not keep in mind that the statistics might just be bad. It's quite plausible that total lynchings were much higher in the 1880s than is reported here, but that white lynchings were reported and counted more often than black lynchings. As the years went on and this was recognized as a real problem, counts of black lynchings became more accurate. If this is the case, then the substantial number of early white lynchings may be a mirage - they may have formed just as small a percentage of the total as they did in later years.

Assault of Thoughts - 7/26/2010

- Two about-faces on liquidity preference and sub-optimal output. Brad DeLong shares how Niall Ferguson went from being a guy that recognized liquidity preference put us on a sub-optimal production level and that we could have both "guns and butter" for a period (oddly enough, he understood the logic a decade ago and thought it applied, but he doesn't think it applies now). Robert Samuelson, on the other hand, has an article talking about the breakdown of Okun's Law - and at the end he essentially makes a liquidity preference point. He also makes a lot of interesting institutional arguments for the breakdown of Okun's Law. Brace yourself, though. You're going to cringe when he calls the thoroughly Ricardian terms of labor and capital "Marxist vocabulary". I guess strictly speaking it's not inaccurate. It is Marxist vocabulary. But it's also pretty standard, orthodox, classical vocabulary.

- Evan has an interesting post on book buying habits, following up on his recent thoughts on Amazon.

- Mario Rizzo has a critique of Brad DeLong that I think falls a little flat. See if you agree - my comment is a little ways down. Let me give this to Rizzo - if his interpretation of DeLong is accurate, his critique is correct. The problem is, his interpretation is a little silly and he reads way too much into what DeLong said.

- The Wall Street Journal publishes a "well duuuuhhhh" article on language and culture (which I suppose is still better than a wrong article, which they've certainly had more than a few of recently). Hasn't anyone heard of Wittgenstein? Speaking of Wittegenstein, he was a friend of Keynes's. Keynes once wrote, after picking Wittgenstein up when he came in to visit "Well God has arrived; I met him on the 5:15 train". Apparently the guy made a positive impression on Keynes.

Some Defunct Economist - 7/26/2010

"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist" - JMK

- Brad DeLong quotes extensively from David Pilling's article on Keynesianism in Asia, and the justified faith that people have in it there. The article also seems to make the cautionary point that effective stimulus was possible in Asia because of the large cash reserves. I would be careful about taking this too far. It's also plausible that growth and living standards were depressed precisely because of years of that public liquidity preference. Regardless of the wisdom of that hoarding policy, Asia is a good place to look to evaluate Keynesian performance now. Krugman also has comments on Pilling here.

- Crooked Timber has an interesting interpretation of a recent Martin Wolf article, suggesting that Keynesianism is an (inadequate) substitute for social democracy. He ties it into the recent Krugman-Cowen debate over Keynesianism and Germany.

- Firedoglake asks the question "why do conservatives hate Keynes". Part of the answer, the author argues, is that Keynes was not afraid to criticize people who hoard capital. I think this is largely on target. It's amazing how many critiques of Keynes simply revolve around things like the "euthanasia of the rentier" rather than actual analytical critiques. In a way that's unfortunate. But I also wouldn't do away with Keynes's "euthanasia of the rentier" or any of his other rhetorical flares. They keep the reader focused. Economic policy is about the public good, not the special interest, and we can't ever keep our eyes off of that. Fighting for some vague notion of the public good isn't an excuse for bad analysis, though - and Keynes is laudable not simply for his enthusiasm but also because analytically he got so much right. But I think that energy is essential.

I would caution Firedoglake against some of its language and approach here. First, they criticize those who "own and manage capital" - this isn't something that Keynes himself ever harped on. In fact, Keynes made it very clear that those who manage capital deserve substantial compensation for a very challenging job. His concern was the rentier, not the managers. The ones who earned without contributing anything to society. The critique was a social and political one as much as an economic one, but it was generally speaking not directed at managers of capital. I'd also echo Lee Kelly's comment from an earlier post that FDL and others in that crowd really need to clean up their language around savings and investment, and this post is no exception. The post makes the important point that not all savings ends up being invested. But then later in discussing sinking funds, the critique is that the money is "saved rather than spent". Well earlier they said that some but not all savings are invested, so is this sinking fund partially spent? "Savings" in the first instance seems to mean a stock of loanable funds, and in the second instance it seems to be a hoard of some sort. This is why we need to be very clear about the distinction between supplying savings to the loanable funds market and liquidity preference. Treating "savings" in one instance as the excess of income over consumption and in the next instance as a hoard, at the same time that many others talk about savings as supply in the loanable funds market is all very confusing. Better I think just to talk about liquidity preference explicitly the way Keynes did.

Cowen on substitutes and the liquidity trap

Regular readers know that I think the liquidity trap is intriguing and certainly relevant right now, but more of a theoretical curiosity than a hugely important factor. Tyler Cowen makes much the same case in this post, which thinks through the zero lower bound argument by reviewing the importance of substitutability in other markets.

Cowen argues that adjustment can be slow for very close substitutes, but that it will happen - and many other factors are important than just the substitutability of cash and Treasuries for the adjustment process. That's all well and good, but the fact remains that the adjustment process is considerably slower for closer substitutes than it is for substitutes that are much less close. It is precisely the close substitutability of cash and Treasuries that makes all the other issues that Cowen talks about relevant right now, and that is the sense in which the liquidity trap is meaningful. Cowen uses the example of the close substitutability of grapes and pluots to talk about the liquidity trap, and he says that substitutability alone does not explain the adjustment. His appetite, for example, is also a factor. I would only add that we're only even talking about "appetite" as a factor because what is introduced is more food (pluots). If Cowen's house guest had brought, say, a bottle of wine we might think of the wine and the grapes as complements rather than substitutes. "Appetite" in the sense of how much food you feel like eating is no longer a constraint at all, because it might be very nice to have wine and grapes together. The close substitutability of grapes and pluots is disconcerting precisely because it introduces the relevance of other constraints like appetite.

That's largely how I think about the liquidity trap. It makes things problematic that wouldn't be problematic under other circumstances. Other than that, it's hard to stretch this metaphor much farther. Grapes and pluots aren't media of exchange, stores of value, or opportunities for speculation, after all - so I'm not sure how much mileage Cowen thought he was going to get out of this. I suppose it works as an explanation for portfolio adjustment, which is what he claims he's talking about. But since when is the importance of the liquidity trap derived from balancing the composition of your portfolio between cash and bonds? That's not really the major point. The point is the demand for liquidity as well as the impact (or lack of impact) of monetary expansion on the interest rate.

I guess I'd offer one more interpretation to push this metaphor a little further. If you were Cowen's house guest and you knew about his grapes/pluots dilemma, it would probably make more sense for you to bring that bottle of wine that would complement grape consumption, rather than those pluots which would be close substitutes for grapes, right?

What could possible complement liquidity preference right now - what could encourage households and firms to work through their liquidity preference - rather than exascerbate it? Probably some additional aggregate demand, right?

To extend, or not to extend

Lately I've been puzzled by this surge of interest on the part of the Democrats in letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire. I can't understand what possible benefit that could provide us right now. It only makes sense to me as an act of vengence - I see no macroeconomic benefit. Quite frankly, I'm not interested in vengence.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think the tax cuts were a good idea in the first place. They were unnecessary at the time, and they blew a big hole in the budget for no good reason. I would have prefered they never passed in the first place (or at least that a smaller cut, with a different structure was passed). It certainly should have been reconsidered when the war really started heating up. But that was then, and this is now. When the facts change, I change my mind. And my mind simply cannot come up with anything positive that could come from letting any of these tax cuts expire.

Until this morning, when I had a thought. Perhaps letting the cuts expire would make a few key votes in Congress less concerned about additional fiscal stimulus. Generally speak, spending is the key issue during a downturn, but if you can do that spending with deficits that's all the better. But really, at this point, we're going to be dealing with a bunch of second-best options. Is it better to raise taxes on the wealthy in the middle of a severe downturn and get more stimulus than it is to keep taxes low and have no stimulus? My preference would be to let the wealthy keep their tax cuts for the time being and have more stimulus, but if I can't have that which would I prefer? We might be better off with the expiration and additional stimulus.

Of course this is all just a thought experiment. There's no guarantee at all that a compensatory stimulus could come out of letting the tax cuts expire. And it would depend on a few key votes from some deficit hawks that are not ideologically opposed to fiscal stimulus (a small sub-population indeed). Republicans would see this as the worst of both worlds. It would only really be convincing for conservative Democrats who worry more about the deficit than they do about the wealthy, and it might not even work for them.

It's a dicey political game that's very unlikely - so I'm still in the "don't let it expire camp". But it was an interesting thought.

Can anyone furnish any good reason to let the tax cuts expire (right now at least)? I simply can't come up with one.

Have I found my leftists?

Recently, Evan suggested to me that I try to actively engage leftist or radical positions in the same way that I engage libertarian and Austrian positions. With the Austrians, I find that I buy a lot of what they have to say - they have interesting insights that have a sense of being "untapped" because they are so out of the mainstream. But they have more than enough analytical, methodological, and philosophical problems that the debate I can have with them is always lively. They're also very active on the internet, which makes the interaction easy.

Evan suggested that I engage radicals in the same way. I'm not entirely opposed to the radical/socialist/leftist outlook. I've found the Trotskyite/New Left position enriching in the same way I've found the Austrians enriching - lot's of good insights but enough differences that I'd never personally align with them. Also, like the Austrians, they are very good at history of thought, which is always intriguing for me. Usually, I turn to Dewey, Hitchens, Orwell, etc. for this stuff. These are guys that don't leave any doubts about their positions on human liberty - which of course makes me more comfortable. Aside from that explicitly anti-totalitarian nexus on the left, though, it's slim pickings. Mattheus von Guttenberg gives an excellent example recently of a Marxist blogger that was so nonsensical he couldn't make heads or tails of the encounter (I would provide a link, but Mattheus and Jonathan's website is temporarily down). In the past I've shared similar concerns about Slavoj Zizek ravings about the end of capitalism. It's just hard. Even the good, sensible Marxists are speaking a whole different language from most of us - but a lot of them aren't even sensible.

Anyway, recently I've posted on the Modern Monetary Theory/post-Keynesian perspective. Whether they're really deficit owls or just deficit super-doves is up for debate. I can't help but get the sense that they're just repeating "solvency isn't a problem! solvency isn't a problem!", while the rest of us Keynesians are calmly saying "we know solvency isn't a problem - we never said it was - we're worried about real growth". If that's all going further down the rabbit hole of post-Keynesianism is going to get me, I'm not sure how fruitful it will be. But maybe they have more to say than that. I may just have to follow their blogs for a while and see. I don't want to just write a bunch of posts on solvency. We shall see. They're not radicals, but I may have found my leftists, Evan.

What do readers think? Would more post-Keynesian material, links, and well honed sniping to draw commenters in be interesting?

I still haven't quite given up on the idea of engaging more of the full-blown Marxists. Does anyone know of intelligible, engageable, interesting radical blogs/communities out there? I think New Left/Frankfurt School type stuff would be best. It would be a real learning experience for me, but I think if a reasonable person wants to engage the left, this is the left to engage.

A young Marx once wrote that philosophers have thus far only interpreted the world, but that the task is to change it. It's hard to argue with that. My problem with many leftists is that they have taken up the banner of change and left the banner of intepretation lying on the ground. That's dangerous - you have to continually re-evaluate your position and your ideas. To me, that's the major liability of the left. We shall see - let me know what you all think.

More on the owls...

In this post critiquing Davidson, Galbraith, and Skidelsky's passivity with respect to the long-term debt, I got several interesting responses from post-Keynesian commenters. A lot of it was resources on the "deficit owl" perspective. I spent a little time looking through each, and doing a cursory review of what they call "Modern Monetary Theory" and has also been called Chartalism (really not a strategically developed name, which I'm guessing has more than a little to do with the newer MMT designation!).

Most of the emphases of this school of thought are right on target. They specifically highlight the implications of sovereignty for the federal debt. A sovereign debt crisis in the U.S. is not a risk the way it is in Greece because we have the freedom to monetize our debt. Of course these guys also talk about functional finance, stabilization policy, and liquidity preference. This is all very good - it can be hard to get a New Keynesian to talk about liquidity preference sometimes! So the real sticking point seems to be the debt. We agree debt monetization removes the risk of a sovereign debt crisis - this is quite standard analysis and not anything that really distinguishes Galbraith, Davidson, and Skidelsky from Reich, Stiglitz, and Krugman. I think the Krugman point (recently, in a disagreement with Galbraith) is the important point to make - debt monetization provides budgetary flexibility (on top of the already substantial flexibility provided by our credit rating and the nature of sovereign governments), but it ultimately just kicks the can down the road. Problems emerge later in terms of inflation and interest rates, but more importantly real growth rates. Janos Kornai's famous observation that governments face "soft budget constraints" doesn't mean that they face no budget constraints. I read and buy into Keynes, Minsky, and Lerner - but I also read and buy into Reinhart and Rogoff (and, well, Keynes!) on the risks involved.

One intriguing option raised by Joe Firestone in the comment section of the last post is to stop issuing debt instruments and just start crediting bank accounts. He provides this link to that option, and L. Randall Wray discusses it further here. They essentially want to cut out the middle man of the Federal Reserve. I don't know enough about the implications of this, and I'd love to hear more discussion in the comment section, but two thoughts immediately come to mind. First, this would bring an end to independence in monetary policy, which is not a pleasant prospect for most economists. Second, as James Macdonald argues, public debt has historically been an essential element in restraining government. Hoarded treasure (aside from being macroeconomically inefficient) ensures that sovereigns are unaccountable to their citizens. Citizen creditors ensure that their government stays accountable. Cutting out this debt instrument gives a sovereign all the revenue-raising power of government bonds, without any of the risk of nervous creditors restraining policy. Perhaps a robust republic can be maintained in such an environment, but if the Macdonald point is right, the chance of abuses are very real.

OK, enough talk. Time for some links. Thanks to Joe Firestone for sharing most of these:

- New Economic Perspectives is a post-Keynesian blog I've followed for a little while now.

- Warren Mosler's blog

- This is Bill Mitchell's blog. Mitchell is at the University of Newcastle's Centre for Full Employment and Equity.

- Here is an interview of Randall Wray and Bill Mitchell, talking about MMT. This is the first one, there are several more that follow.

- Firedoglake and Corrente post regularly on Modern Monetary Theory. I've pulled the MMT tagged posts here (FDL) and here (Corrente) for your convenience.

- Recently these guys had a "fiscal sustainability teach-in" at my alma-mater, The George Washington University. The website for that event is here. I know a guy that was involved in this (Alex Lawson - big activist/advocate if any readers know of him), so I heard updates from it. It did a lot of important work I think - trying to educate people on why Social Security isn't the big risk a lot of people think it is. Of course, as my comments above suggest, I also think they down played more genuine risks.

- Joe Firestone shares this New Deal 2.0 post with me to "address some of the concerns" about the long-term debt. Of course nothing Wray writes in here is new to me or controversial to me, nor does it address the concerns I have. I'm not worried about our ability to pay back our debt. I understand why public debt is different from private debt. And regular readers can attest to the fact that I'm not shy about running up deficits. The bigger concern for me is the impact on real growth rates. And that, of course, is precisely the point that this blog post ignores. Anyway, I have two other reasons for highlighting this: (1.) New Deal 2.0 is another good site worth following, and (2.) an interesting historical point they make. The only time we've ever retired the debt was in 1835. In 1837 we had a severe depression. Does anyone know if these two events are related? I imagine at the time the federal budget was too small to make this sort of macroeconomic difference, but it's possible. Nothing says "liquidity preference" quite like a sinking fund. Anyway - just a query. Joe also provides, this, this, this, this, and this to "address my concerns".

- I'll also share once again the Levy Institute's website. This group does a lot of work with Minsky's theories, and also has strong post-Keynesian influences. This is their program on Monetary Policy, and this is an interesting recent working paper from them outlining what "fiscal responsibility" should mean. I thought this was an especially good passage. It highlights the MMT argument, and it provides an interesting philosophical justification and explanation of the role of government:

"If the government acts not as a self-interested individual, but in order to allow citizens to achieve their intended expenditure decisions, it must engage in policies that support private sector decisions in such a way that they lead to public good. It should act to coordinate and offset the incompatible combination of firms’ and households’ intentions. If households follow the rule of virtue and seek to save too much, then the government should run a fiscal deficit that is just equal to the shortfall between households’ desires to save and firms’ expectations of profits. By doing so it can allow each individual to achieve his desired objective. But, it also avoids the loss in income that would result from the mismatch. Here the government can intervene to make private vices into public virtue by encouraging prodigality when the private sector desires to be frugal. Government prodigality is the equivalent of supporting public virtue! This is the fiscal policy of a responsible government, responsible to insure that private sector decisions can be achieved rather thwarted by the law of unintended consequences."

Webb and Affirmative Action

Since we're going down the divisive race-tinged politics path, I'll also share an excellent op-ed by my Senator (who, I might add, I voted for in his race against George Allen), Jim Webb, on why we should get rid of affirmative action programs.

Webb makes two points about affirmative action that I consider to be quite self-evident:

1. It is fundamentally unfair and discriminatory, and
2. It was an absolutely defensible, if imperfect, remedy for centuries of state-sponsored discrimination

These two obviously butt up against each other, and I've fallen out on the pro-affirmative-action side of that clash, while still recognizing the truth of both points. He buys both of these arguments too, and then he makes some very good additional points in favor of dropping affirmative action:

- Affirmative action now is not helping who it is supposed to help: African Americans. Non-African American "people of color"are benefiting from this policy despite the fact that their history of discrimination doesn't even begin to approach that of African Americans.

- Race based policies that treat whites as a monolith ignore disadvantaged white sub-populations deserving of help (Webb specifically mentions poor Southern whites). At the same time, they give a leg-up to "people of color" that are advantaged by treating "people of color" as a monolith (more recent Asian immigrants, for example). This isn't some naive "we should be color-blind" point. This is a serious point that monolithic racial thinking obscures disadvantages within the categories "white" and "people of color".

I think these are both sensible observations. Am I swayed on my position on affirmative action (which I actually came to through a long, complicated, acrimonious episode on campus at William and Mary - it was not a position I came to casually)? Not by this op-ed alone, no. But I think he makes some excellent points.

I would add one of my own - one nagging problem I have had with affirmative action even through my conversion to being a supporter of the practice. Affirmative action generally improves the chances of people of color at later stages of their lives: college and employment, specifically. It seems to me, by then the problem is already entrenched. The real disadvantage faced by African Americans is not in the admissions committees of colleges, it is in the quality of primary education in their communities. It seems to me, affirmative action at these later stages does nothing to impact the root cause of these problems. It's a farce, in that sense. Perhaps it takes a few real achievers from bad schools and gives them a chance to shine as they could have shined in high school if they had a more supportive environment. Perhaps. And that's what's kept me supporting the program. But it isn't a solution for black students who have already lost out in elementary school and middle school, where I imagine the bulk of the problem lies.

On Secession

Three blog posts recently on secession:

- OK, the first is technically on nullification - the Mises Institute interviews Tom Woods on his new book on state nullification. For those of you not familiar with him, Tom Woods is an Austrian-oriented historian that I have a big problem with when it comes to the 1920-21 depression. But that's another matter. His new book is on nullification.

- David Ribar, a fairly liberal economics professor at UNC, an alum of my alma mater (William and Mary), former professor at my other alma mater (The George Washington University), and one-time co-panelist at a Southern Economic Association conference, does a round-up of recent secession-happy Republicans, and reviews one case in particular.

I actually think secession isn't as unreasonable a position as a lot of people think it is. I don't see how you can admire the founders and admire Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence in particular and not be ethically and legally fine with secession. We cannot be a nation of, by, and for the people if the people are not free to withdraw their consent to their government (an enormous irony of Lincoln's famous address).

Nullification, I think, is a different matter. It may have been a tenable position in the early antebellum period, when the institutions of governance were being worked out. But decisions were made, institutions developed, and social contracts (much as I hate that term) were forged. Nullification now is repudiation of that institutional evolution. You cannot remain in the Union and repudiate the terms of Union at the same time. To a certain extent, then, I suppose all I'm really saying is that nullification amounts to secession. I oppose the very idea of nullification as a course of action that stands independent of outright secession.

So I actually wouldn't be as critical as Ribar is, but I wouldn't be as enthusiastic as Woods is. My question for secessionists isn't so much "how could you think this is legal or ethical", as it is "how could you possibly think this is necessary or desirable"? They are treating the dumbest move on the part of the South like it was its greatest triumph. I'm not as dismissive of the Confederacy as a lot of people are, and I hold a fairly nuanced view of the Civil War. But even a "less dismissive than average" view of the Confederacy I think can still be nothing more than a qualified disapproval. Even those positively disposed towards the South as a civilization have to recognize the attending evils of the Confederacy, and not just the evils but the unforgivable blunders. And secession is among those blunders. It's not a question of "can they do that?" for me. They can. It's a question of "why would you do that?". The leaders of the secessionist movements in the antebellum South need to be regarded, even by sympathetic Southerners, with "impotent fury" (to quote Harper Lee). One might defensibly say "with Lincoln's army marching and threatening my home, I'll pick up my gun and fight". One cannot defensibly argue that secession was intelligent, or well-advised, or in the interests of the South. It's even more infuriating that so many secessionists, then and now, uphold Washington specifically as an icon; Washington! - one of the greatest examples of what it means to be a "Union man".

Anyway, I'm not lawyer but the legal niceties of secession never bothered me all that much. The right to secede seems to me to follow naturally from the right to incorporate a state in the first place. Any statute on the books that would oppose that right simply begs the question. After all - it's precisely that statue book that presumably one is seceding from! The question of why one would even consider the prospect of secession, so long as the United States remains such a paragon of republicanism, liberty, and democratic representation - that is a question that I simply can't answer.