Columbus Day: Libertarian Economist Says the Left is Right to Condemn Columbus

Economist Bryan Caplan, sometime Reason
contributor and author of some great consensus-breaking books
about
voting and
child-rearing, speaks
up against that rat bastard Chrisopher Columbus on this
national holiday celebrating him (on which most of you are likely
working anyway):

The far left’s radical critique of Columbus Day rubs a lot of
people the wrong way. But the facts are on their side. Columbus was
not just a brutal slaver; he was a pioneer of slavery….

Can you condemn a man just for being a slaver? Of course. It’s
almost as bad as you can get. And Columbus didn’t even have the
lame excuses of a Thomas Jefferson, like “I grew up with it,” or “I
couldn’t afford not to do it.”

The lamest excuse of all is that we have to judge Columbus by
the standards of his time. For this is nothing but
the cultural
relativism that defenders of Western civilization so often
decry. If some cultures and practices are better than others, then
we can fairly hold up a mirror to Columbus and the Spanish
conquerors, and find theirs to be among the worst.

But hasn’t the European colonization of the New World been an
improvement? Even if this were true, it would be no reason to have
a special day to honor Columbus and his ilk. If Mengele had cured
cancer, should we celebrate Mengele Day? In any case, you’ve got to
ask: Compared to what? The benefits of Western culture would have
spread at least as rapidly if the Europeans had arrived in the New
World as traders and teachers instead of conquerors and
slavers.

Since it is often presumed that a point-and-quote blog post
implies strong agreement on the part of the blogger, I will point
out that I’m neither sure I agree nor disagree with this sort of
application of contemporary moral standards on figures from the
past (and I expect that I will likely have emotional responses
based on how much I otherwise admire or despise the figure at times
rather than reactions based on unimpeachable and unaltering
applications of eternal principles).

I’m not even sure I agree that it matters in any way what
judgment you or I in the present have about figures from the past,
so this is presented as an argument-starter, not an argument
ender.