Authored by Connor O’Keefe via The Mises Institute,
Today is Juneteenth. One hundred fifty-nine years ago, on June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Texas and declared that all slaves in the state were free.
The following year, in 1866, residents of the town where Granger had issued the order celebrated the anniversary as “Jubilee Day.” Eventually, the name changed to Juneteenth, and in 1979, it became a Texas state holiday. Then, in 2021, President Joe Biden signed a bill designating Juneteenth as a federal holiday.
The West’s abolition of chattel slavery was one of the greatest victories for liberty in our civilization’s history. Using an anniversary like today to celebrate the achievement and reflect on why it was necessary in the first place – or how it could have come about better – should be a rare point of unity in today’s politically fractured America.
But in the years since Biden signed the so-called Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, the holiday has become increasingly co-opted by progressives in media, academia, and politics as a way to push for radical policies like collective reparations or the exclusion of white people from celebrations.
Because of that, most of the rhetoric we see from those promoting Juneteenth sidesteps the actual issue of slavery. They do so because adherents of modern progressivism do not actually believe in self-ownership, the antithesis of slavery.
Only libertarians have a consistent commitment to self-ownership. We believe that nobody has the right to another’s labor. Nobody can justly claim ownership over another’s body or the fruits of their labor. Progressives do not believe this.
Modern American progressivism can be defined by its commitment to what are called positive rights. Where negative rights entail an obligation not to do something, like murder or steal, positive rights refer to the supposed right to be provided with something, like education or healthcare. When backed by the force of law, positive rights produce a legal system where electing not to use your labor toward some specific end is tantamount to a rights violation—which, therefore, warrants the use of force to compel that labor involuntarily.
These days, the coercion underlying progressive programs is shifted from the service provider to the working professionals taxed to pay for them. The average American works the equivalent of thirty-eight days a year exclusively to fund government programs. For those with higher incomes, that number is closer to sixty-five days. The only problem progressives have with this violent expropriation of wealth through taxation is that there’s not enough of it.
It is ironic that Americans are forced to work to fund a paid day off for federal employees to celebrate the end of involuntary labor. Much more absurd, however, is that much of our taxed income these days is—with the enthusiastic support of the progressive establishment—being sent to the Ukrainian government, which is quite literally enslaving young men and forcing them to fight against the Russians.
And, although it is not active at the moment, the House of Representatives recently passed a bill to automatically register young men for the draft with little to no pushback from progressives.
While detailing the brutality of slavery in colonial Virginia, Murray Rothbard wrote that the essence of slavery is that “human beings, with their inherent freedom of will, with individual desires and convictions and purposes, are used as capital, as tools for the benefit of their master. The slave is therefore habitually forced into types and degrees of work that he would not have freely undertaken.”
Progressives have demonstrated, through action and rhetoric, that they do not actually find the essence of slavery to be unjust. Their opposition to American chattel slavery is genuine, but it tends to boil down to it being racist.
Only libertarians have a consistent, principled, and ongoing opposition to slavery in all its forms and degrees.
The abolition of chattel slavery was a major triumph for human liberty that’s worth commemorating. But we have a lot further to go—thanks in no small part to those most aggressively celebrating today.
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Reparations aren’t about the money, they’re about shaming whypeepo people for something they never even did
Got a terminal case of nigger fatigue.
Don’t care, never will.
All day I hear people laughing and making fun of juneteenth, complaining about banks being closed etc. It is a literal joke and nobody takes it seriously. The media is trying awful hard to make it appear legit. Even the niggers don’t care about it unless they can get something for nothing.
The hot weather version of Kwanza.
Hot weather, three day weekend just means more shoot-em-up in the hood. Racking up the body count.
Then what’s with all their shooting at the celebrations every year?
It’s a fake holiday named after an illiterate expression. Everything coming from DC is fake.
I think the Muslim slave traders that sold the negros into slavery should pay the reparations. Personally, my family never owned slaves and more than a few of them died to free them in Mr. Lincoln’s war.
The CW was not about slavery, mouse. Now we know you’re a Yankee. 🙂
There hasn’t been a negro slave or slave owner for 150+ years and counting.
Fuck juneteenth and all the other race hustling bullshit.
I refuse to keep playing this boring game.
Artist, the WEF says we iz all niggahs now, “You will own nothing” (and be our slaves). Like the article pointed out, the commies/progressives aka the Zionists will take it all and leave you a slave at which point the game gets a little more real. The oppressed kneegrows are back in the slave quarters and they will have helped drag us along with their ignorant asses.
To be fair communism/progressivism is merely a construct of utter destruction invented by the Zionists in order to bring the world to a point where they CAN take it all. They are a death cult and they ultimately want us all dead and gone with maybe 500 mil. left to do their bidding.
Technoplantation
Absolutely. That chip in the head will make you buy products, commercials/ads will no longer exist or if they feel you are too old there is a kill switch (or something similar). The possibilities are endless are they not? I’m not saying the Unibombers was right but………
I have a non verbal message for them if the come for me.
You’re an artist, eh? You paint houses?
Only two things come from Colorado:
Yee! and Ha!
Good show Colorado!
No shit…but I think you still managed to get my point…and we were all Yankees.
Not to put too fine a point on your comment…but, half my family tree fought for the North and half the South.
Any beneficiary/heirs of the West African kings who harvested and sold slaves should pay, if anyone else is forced to:
“In the 1750s, King Tegbesu of Dahomey, in present-day Benin, was reported to be making £250,000 a year from selling slaves. That astronomical sum, equivalent to perhaps £45 million today, was vastly more than any British aristocrat”
Sold his own people.
https://x.com/WanjiruNjoya/status/1644759604180533250
.
In Africa black people don’t say whites need to be made welcome and included. They say whites should be expelled and all their property seized.
Meanwhile in Europe black people demand to be made welcome and included. White people who upset them get jailed for hate speech.
https://x.com/WanjiruNjoya/status/1764157665968537618
I was a quiet academic in rural Devon until I was radicalized by white liberals telling me I must kneel down for George Floyd and pledge allegiance to a group of semi-literate commies called Black Lives Matter.
To which my answer was: NO.
What “radicalized” you?
https://x.com/WanjiruNjoya/status/1780983119253770484
It’s bizarre that people want Britain, the country that enforced the ban on slave trade, to apologize. Yet they NEVER demand apologies from Arabs, who captured and sold African slaves long before Europeans showed up.
Nor from Africans who sold their own as slaves.
Hypocrites.
https://x.com/WanjiruNjoya/status/1772482408010465411
Not many people know this, but African slavers did NOT want to stop selling their kinsmen into slavery. It was lucrative business. They were cross with Britain for abolishing slavery. They refused to quit slaving. Royal Navy lost 17,000 men fighting to make Africans quit slaving.
https://x.com/WanjiruNjoya/status/1644833008115916802
The Royal Navy was the only force in the world that had the drive, willingness and firepower to curtail the slave trade.”
17,000 seamen died in the campaign to end the slave trade. It is right that their sacrifice should be remembered.
https://x.com/WanjiruNjoya/status/1743668540027068439
1. Capture your own people and sell them into slavery
2. Take European bronze as payment; cast bronze images as your treasure
3. Kill a bunch of British sailors trying to stop you from slaving
4. Lose the Bronzes in a punitive raid
5. Guilt-trip Europe into returning the Bronzes
https://x.com/WanjiruNjoya/status/1657491400290713600
She goes on, and on:
https://x.com/WanjiruNjoya
Reason NOT To Abolish Slavery:
https://mises.org/mises-wire/ten-reasons-not-abolish-slavery
The blacks in africa conquered their neighbors and sold them to anyone with the money to buy them …
The triangle route — from the distilleries in Newport to the money in Amsterdam to the slave traders in africa — the jews made a serious killing bringing slavery to the plantation economy they grew from the South to brazil.
How about the Jews bringing them over here and selling them?
Bring back Washington’s birthday and Lincolns birthday as holidays .
REPARATIONS HAVE BEEN PAID IN FULL with the blood, misery and sacrifice of over two million people who died of all causes, from battle to starvation, exposure, disease, and years of suffering of the wounded, many of whom later died. Reparations were paid in BLOOD. You don’t put a price on the BLOOD DEBT that this country paid without dirtying and dishonoring that sacrifice. PAID IN BLOOD and PAID IN FULL.
‘reparations’ have also been paid via the trillions in ‘great society’ programs since 1965 … LBJ’s gift to the future.
The Wonderful Problem With Juneteenth,
Juneteenth’s a Problematic Thing,
It Tops are Made Out Of Velli,
It’s Bottoms Are Made Of Springs
What?
By now negroes have stolen enough bicycles to equal the value of all picked cotton.
When do we celebrate Umpteenth? That’s my favorite because it’s a really big number but it’s still in the teens.
Chattel slaveey was replaced with debt slavery. Whites carry the majority of the burden.
It was Senator Cornynholio that propsed the bill making 6/19 a fed holiday.
Wake me up on National FAFO Day. Bring fireworks!
JUNETEENTH IS MEANINGLESS SIMPLY BECAUSE “SLAVERY WAS NEVER REALLY ABOLISHED…MORE LIKE EXPANDED TO INCLUDE ANYONE WHO IS NOT “WHITE”!
THE USA WAS NEVER ABOUT “FREEDOM” FOR EVERYONE…ONLY WHITE PEOPLE!
THE USA IS A “CORPORATION” FORMED TO CREATE A “HELLENISTIC/ZIONIST” EMPIRE THAT “THINKS” IS OF “DIVINE” NATURE!
JUST LOOK AROUND YOU FOLKS…THESE AR EONE RESPONSIBLE FOR “ALL” THE SATANIC EVIL THAT IS ONGOING!
THEY LIVE BY THE “SCORED EARTH”, LIVE AND LET DIE CODES!
LIVE AND LET LIVE SCARES THE HELL OUT OF THEM!
THEY WOULD RATHER SEE THE WHOLE PLANET DESTROYED BEFORE GIVING IN TO PEACE AND PROSPERITY FOR “EVERYONE” HUMAN!
THEY BELIEVE IN “ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE”…AS IF THE GOD’S MADE MISTAKES IN HUMAN CREATION!
THEY BELIEVE THAT “GOD” IS A WHITE MAN…GET THAT?!?
The concept of White Gods which protect life and creation is far superior to the mainstream depiction of a Jewish or Islamic God who promises Armageddon.
What people believe will have an impact on how life on this planet turns out. I prefer to believe in Gods who give hope and inspire to work towards better ends, not threaten complete destruction. We can do better than mainstream narratives and beliefs, and be better for it.
Slavery is still normal in Africa. Pretty much anywhere Caucasians are not the majority.