Thomas Woods Replies (Hummel's Critique)

Thomas Woods kindly and promptly sent me the following email after my previous blog . I had asked whether Woods planned to write a response to Jeffrey Roger Hummel's critique of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History:

I think I've written all the replies I intend to write at this point. Much of our disagreement is a matter of interpretation, as with Reconstruction; this is certainly Clyde Wilson's view of Hummel's arguments. Moreover, the" constitutional fetishism" stuff, while I understand the Spoonerite position, is just inside baseball talk that I don't think most people would consider exactly a home run against me. (Gene Healy, for example, who seems like a Spoonerite to me, argues that" constitutional consent" is, although a very distant second-best to the kind of unanimous consent Spooner thinks necessary, nevertheless at least something.) He's right that the book could be more radical, which is why I thought it was so funny that the Left reacted as it did -- this book is _tame_, I thought.

On the Indian land question, Hummel is just being unreasonable. Jennifer Roback, Anderson & Hill, and other libertarians take exactly the position I do -- that in the early years land transactions were by and large fair, and that the outrages came later. (See Anderson and Hill, The Not So Wild Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier, Stanford, 2005.)