Originally Posted by 6South

Any state the size of Texas, with the tax base, population and economy Texas has could easily replace any Federal services. Do you think all the soldiers and other Federal employees would leave the state if something like this happened?

That's the logic equivalent of saying that small countries such as most of Europe and the rest of the World for that matter can not exist without the financial and personnel support of a population as large as the rest of the US. It's ridiculous.

The demand for Federal services would scale to the size of the population needing it and besides, Texas pays a hell of lot more into the Federal coffers than it gets back in direct services needed by the population. Having spent most of my adult life working on Government and Defense projects I can tell you with no doubt that most Federal budgets are used to create jobs performed by people who are incompetent and assisted by several other people just as incompetent.
Q. How many Feds does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Millions -
The EPA to make sure the light bulb can be changed safely and will be replaced by a safe bulb, The IRS to collect the money to pay for the new bulb and the salaries of all the Feds involved, the Congress, Senate and Executive branch to add the bulb and labor to the Federal budget, the Federal Reserve to print the money, the World Bank to loan the Reserve the money at 80 percent interest (and the rest of us to pay Taxes to cover their salaries and most excellent health benefits).

At some point the left and whoever else in this country revised history so they could teach liberals and minorities that the civil war wasn't fought over slavery. That's the exact equivalent of saying porn models don't fuck for money.

The official reason Lincoln called up volunteers and attacked the South (in response to Fort Sumter, a situation Lincoln and his staff made sure happen to provide justification, the same exact reason Davis allowed the attack to happen by the way) was in response to the first set of states leaving the Union.

What's missed is the reason why those states left and the fact that Lincoln had spent his entire campaign running on an abolitionist platform. The timing of the confederacy was just prior to Lincoln taking office. Hell, Lincoln even crossed over from being a Democrat to running as a Republican because the Democratic party of that time was the party of the pro-slavery movement.

No way is every fought for a single reason, there were financial reasons for both sides taking the actions they took. The other reason for the states seceding was the legislation that made the new states (Kansas, etc) either non slave states or states which would have to decide on their own. The wealthiest members of Southern Society were not the planters, they were the slavers and they had big plans for the expansion of their industry to the Western frontier.

So no, ending slavery was not an initial "War goal" for the North but it WAS planned all along and Lincoln only waited for the right moment to begin the ball rolling with the emancipation proclamation (which only affected the confederate states). He was smart enough to know the issue had to be given in small doses to prevent a reaction that might have torn the North apart.

Anyway, the point is the parallels to past history are very interesting. The original secession was in reaction to Lincoln's election - these online petitions (though useless in terms of accomplishing their stated goals) are a direct reaction to the re-election of Obama.

The left and Obama's big fans will call this racism, as usual. While there are probably a few people motivated by that anyone attributing it as the primary cause is fooling themselves. This is about people trying to make a statement about the fact that the system no longer represents their interests. Obama has been a continuation of a much larger and longer planned agenda, there's very little difference between the elected results no matter which party they come from.

Ignoring these voices is a big mistake. They are like an iceberg barely visible above water, for every person who signed one of these there are tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands more.

It's just too bad Americans are too lazy to actually create real change be it within the system or otherwise.