Mitt Romney surrogate Ted Nugent (you remember Ted…the ‘entertainer’ who is now a conservative idiot) decided to start his usual shrill noise again by penning an op-ed in which he, basically, says that the Supreme Court’s decision about ‘Obamacare’ was evidence that the US would have been better off if “the South had won the Civil War”.

Nugent attacked Chief Justice John Roberts and wrote that he “squandered the opportunity to restore judicial, financial and legislative sanity to a government that by any sane person’s standards is insane and addicted to centralized federal control of our lives.”

Oh yawn!

Nugent writes at one point:

Unlike other conservatives, I don’t care if his vote to save Obamacare turns into a cash cow for the Mitt Romney’s presidential political machine and galvanizes the GOP. There are some things more important than politics and elections. Striking down un-American, Constitution-violating Obamacare is one of them.

There you have it! Ted Nugent has just called the Founding Fathers un-American and violators of the Constitution! You see, far back in the history of the United States, the Militia Acts were written and passed into law. Specifically, the Second Militia Act states that:

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective states, resident therein, who is or shall be of the age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia by the captain or commanding officer of the company, within whose bounds such citizen shall reside, and that within twelve months after the passing of this act.
. . .
That every citizen so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, How to be armed and accoutred. provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch with a box therein to contain not less than twenty-four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball: or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder; and shall appear, so armed, accoutred and provided, when called out to exercise, or into service, except, that when called out on company days to exercise only, he may appear without a knapsack.

To boil that down- every able-bodied White man in the United States (barring some exemptions) must be part of the militia and must by all their own equipment including a rifle and so forth. That’s right, not only did the Militia Acts mandate that all able-bodied White men serve and buy their own equipment, but that law stayed on the books until it was replaced by the Dick Act which created the National Guard.

Nugent also wrote:

Because our legislative, judicial and executive branches of government hold the 10th Amendment in contempt, I’m beginning to wonder if it would have been best had the South won the Civil War. Our Founding Fathers’ concept of limited government is dead.

Ah, yes, the Romantic view of the South if it had won the Civil War. Unfortunately for the South, that Romantic view would never have come to pass. To begin with, the South lacked any kind of solid industrial base. This is largely why they lost the war, in fact. They had very few railroads, no real manufacturing, and a dearth of skilled labor. They were heavily agrarian, and reliant upon staples like cotton and rice.

Four years after the end of the Civil War something occurred which really crippled the Southern economy which was already struggling to recover from the Civil War. In 1869, the Suez Canal opened and staples like cotton and rice could flow more cheaply from India and the Far East to Europe. In fact, this dropped the bottom of the economy out of the South and they struggled to recover for the next century trying to recreate the anti-bellum economic structure. The South would not modernize until textile companies began to move south in order to avoid the unions.

So, basically, had the South succeeded in seceding, they would likely have been a Third World nation today with little economic power and limited to the area between the Atlantic and Texas- that is if Texas had not been taken back by the Mexicans.