The speech was entitled “The Conquest of the United States by Spain” to denote the fact that the Spanish-American war, an imperialistic war of conquest, was no different from the types of aggressive wars that the old empires of Europe had been waging for centuries.  Having devoted his adult life to scholarly pursuits in the field of political economy (among others), William Graham Sumner was prescient in his predictions about what America would become once it embarked on the road to empire.  Among his observations were the following:

The Spanish-American War, like future American wars of imperialism, was “justified” by a string of “sensational assertions” that are easily proven to be untrue.  Spain never threatened any American “interests,” and would have been the last to have an incentive to sabotage the Battleship Maine, the calamity that stoked war fever and got the masses (“Boobus Americanus in H.L. Mencken’s words) behind the short “war.”  Scholars like Sumner may have easily seen through the government’s lies, but not the rationally-ignorant masses.

“Where is the statesmanship” in lying and manipulating the public into an aggressive war, Sumner asked rhetorically.  This of course had become the new definition of “statesmanship” ever since Lincoln manipulated the Northern-state-public into acquiescing in his waging of total war on their fellow American citizens in the Southern states so that the “duties and imposts” could be collected there, as he promised in his first inaugural address.  To this day, Republican Party propaganda mills like the Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College pretend to offer courses of study in “statesmanship” of the sort that was mocked and ridiculed by Sumner.

If “self-government” for people of the Spanish empire was the ostensible purpose of the war, why was the American public not involved in any way in instigating the war?, asked Sumner.  There was not even an opinion poll taken, he pointed out.  This point echoes the words of Randolph Bourne in his famous essay, “War is the Health of the State,” in which he pointed out that the public never has anything to do with the preparations for war. It is always a dozen or so connivers and schemers in the executive branch of government, hidden even from elected members of congresses and parliaments, who plot and plan for wars.

Was the war merely a public school civics class writ large?  Sumner also mocked the idea promoted by the war party that Americans are merely interested in teaching Filipinos about democracy and self-government, and then we will leave.  Sumner did not believe that “we” would ever leave the Philippines.  We are still there today.

The struggle for world domination (imperialism) is destructive of democracy.  Although American military interventionism was being sold to Boobus Americanus as a means of spreading democracy, Sumner pointed out that such tactics had led Spain into monarchy and bankruptcy, but such facts were simply ignored by the American war party.

Why do Americans believe they have a “civilizing mission,” Sumner asked.  The answer to this rhetorical question lies in the deification of Abe Lincoln by the Republican Party, which in effect was the entire federal government, in the previous thirty-five years.  Lincoln’s deification led to the deification of the presidency in general, and to the federal government as well.  As Robert Penn Warren wrote in his outstanding book, The Legacy of the Civil War, the Republican Party in the post-war years claimed to possess a “treasury of virtue” that supposedly justified anything and everything the government did anywhere on earth by virtue of the fact that it was the American government that was doing it.  This is what “justified” American entry into World War I, for instance, wrote Robert Penn Warren.  It was given the obnoxious name “American exceptionalism.”  Sumner noted the absurdity of employing Lincoln’s “all men are created equal” rhetoric from the Gettysburg Address to argue that it is somehow “liberating” for people of other countries to be governed by us.

William Graham Sumner warned that “a matter of mind” that views other peoples as “less human” than you would lead to “cruelty and tyranny” by the American government, as was the case with all other governments in history that ruled over empires.  This of course was always the way of empires.  Southerners were demonized to “justify” the mass murder of tens of thousands of civilian women, children, and old men, and the bombing and burning of entire cities like Atlanta and Richmond during the “Civil War.”  The Plains Indians were dehumanized as “savages” while the brave men of the U.S. Army murdered tens of thousands of Indian women and children from 1865 to 1890.  Now it was the Filipinos’ turn.  At least 200,000 Filipinos were eventually murdered by the U.S. government for resisting becoming a part of the American empire.  According to historian Joseph Stromberg, only about 15,000 of them were actual combatants.

“We must devise a government” for other peoples is another piece of war propaganda that Sumner found to be intolerably arrogant and hypocritical.  This argument has been used over and over again by generations of American warmongering and imperialistic politicians.  A recent example would be Obama’s September 25, 2012 speech before the United Nations in which he praised the dead CIA operative Chris Stevens, who was killed in the attack on the American “embassy” in Benghazi, Libya, after being sent there as Obama’s “representative.”  He was sent there, said Obama, to “craft a vision for a future” for Libya and Libyans.

The next time you witness a large American flag covering the entire football field before an NFL game; or the flyover of fighter jets before a sporting event; or people wearing American flag shirts and pants while watching the “President’s Cup” golf tournament (which this year featured a naked female streaker carrying a large American flag); or listen to drunks at a bar cheering and shouting “USA! USA!” while watching American bombs dropped on someone in a foreign country on the bar’s boob tube; or attend a church service decorated with flags and listen to a sermon that thanks “our heroes” for murdering people in foreign countries,  think of this comment by William Graham Sumner:  “The thirst for glory is an epidemic which robs people of their judgment, seduces their vanity, cheats them of their interests, and corrupts their consciences.”

The “essence of militarism,” Sumner observed, is to despise constitutions, to sneer at parliaments, and to look with contempt at civilians.  All the neocon talking heads, from Limbaugh to Hannity and Levin and others, adopted the slogan, “9/11 changed everything” every time someone like Judge Andrew Napolitano would argue that the government was acting in contempt of the Constitution with its warrantless wiretaps, internet and cellphone spying, the PATRIOT Act, etc.  All American presidents have simply ignored Congress, for the most part, in instigating wars; and of course all politicians at all times (with one or two exceptions) look with absolute contempt at the average citizen.

Sumner wrote of how the war party of his day was making the “the times have changed” argument for war.  This was reminiscent of Lincoln’s similar argument that “we must think anew and act anew,” by which he also meant “to hell with the Constitution.”

Militarism destroys capitalist prosperity, Sumner also warned.  He observed that all during the late nineteenth century most Europeans were busy working, investing, starting businesses, and improving their standards of living peacefully under a growing capitalist system with little attention being paid to militarism.  Such behavior is absolute poison to the state, however, which considers it to be a mortal enemy.  So when European war parties began to militarize, Sumner wrote of how government military spending was crowding out private sector growth so much that European capitalism was being “arrested, diverted, and crippled.”  This is always the effect of the growth of militarism in particular and of government in general, and in Sumner’s time America was about to embark on the very same economically-destructive path as the Europeans had so foolishly done.

How will we know when we have become like the Old European empires?, Sumner asked.  His answer was that America would become awash in “war, debt, taxation, diplomacy, a grand-government system, pomp, glory, a big army and navy, lavish expenditures, and political robbery – in a word, imperialism.”  This has been a textbook definition of American society for quite a long time now, and becoming more and more so by the day.

“The great foe of democracy is plutocracy,” Sumner declared, and militarism always fuels plutocracy.  It does so through “robbery” (i.e., crony capitalism), diverting the public’s attention from their real economic problems, large government expenditures  that benefit a few well-connected defense contracting corporations, and large government expenditures and debt that make the strong stronger and the weak weaker.”  This of course is a precise definition of how the American warfare/welfare state, funded by the Fed, has so greatly enriched the “one percenters” at the expense of almost everyone else, as documented in great detail by David Stockman in his book, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, and by Hunter Lewis’s Crony Capitalism in America.   This is also a major theme of my books, The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked; Hamilton’s Curse; and How Capitalism Saved America.

In light of all this, it is understandable why an acquaintance of mine who is a Yale graduate recently remarked that of all the paintings and photographs of famous Yale professors and alumni that adorn the Yale libraries and other buildings on campus, the image of William Graham Sumner cannot be found.

“The imperialistic people’s state scarcely differs from the old princely state in its interpretation of sovereignty and its boundaries.  Like the latter, it knows no other limits to the expansion of its rule than those drawn by the opposition of an equally strong power.  Even its lust for conquest is unlimited . . . .  Foreign peoples are in its eyes not subjects but objects of policy.”

–Ludwig von Mises, “The Roots of Imperialism”

My five-week online Mises Academy course on “Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism” begins this evening.  It’s not too late to enroll.

Good question.  The answer is:  The kind of world where the U.S. government murders more than 80 people in their own home, including dozens of children, in Waco, Texas during the Clinton administration with deadly CS gas and  hour after hour of tear gas bombs.

Good question.  Here’s the answer.

The state, on the other hand, “is essentially a concept of power, of competition.”  Conflating the two concepts – country and state – sends one into a hopeless and very dangerous confusion.  For the history of the American country is one of “conquest of the land, of the growth of wealth, of the enterprise of education, and the carrying out of spiritual ideals.”

The history of the American state, by contrast, is one of “making war, obstructing international trade, preventing itself from being split to pieces, punishing  those citizens whom society agrees are offensive, and collecting money to pay for it all.

In peacetime the state “has almost no trappings to appeal to the common man’s emotions,” wrote Bourne.  The average citizen largely ignores the state.  For example, at the outset of the American “Civil War” the only connection the average citizen had with the federal government was though the post office and paying about $45/year in taxes.  This of course is considered to be a disaster or a calamity by all statists.

“With the shock of war,” however, “the state comes into its own again.”  War is the health of the state.  It is the reason given for high taxes, internal revenue bureaucracies, pervasive spying, censorship, military conscription, the abolition of civil liberties, heavy debt, an explosive growth of government spending and borrowing, extensive excise taxation, nationalization of industries, socialist central planning, massive public indoctrination campaigns, the punishment and imprisonment of dissenters to the state’s rule, the shooting of deserters from its armies, the conquest of other countries, inflation of the currency, demonization of private enterprise and the civil society for being insufficiently “patriotic,” the growth of a military/industrial complex, a vast expansion of governmental pork barrel spending, the demonization of the ideas of freedom and individualism and those who espouse them, and a never-ending celebration, if not deification, of statism and militarism.

The average citizen has no interest in any of this.  The average citizen of a militaristic empire is nothing more than a taxpayer/supplier of cannon fodder in the eyes of the state.  Therein lies the state’s biggest conundrum:  How to go about getting the masses to go along with their own self enslavement as taxpayers and cannon fodder and cheerleaders for war.  The answer to this conundrum has always been the crafting of a series of lies about the “imperative” to wage war.  For as Bourne also wrote: “[A]ll foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war are . . . the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.”

Most people are “rationally ignorant” of almost all of what government does, and they are the most ignorant about foreign policy.  This allows politicians to lie nations into war with impunity, for they have always understood that “the moment war is declared . . . the mass of the people through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed [of starting a war] themselves (emphasis added).”  At that point “the citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the state once more walks in august presence, through the imaginations of men.”  Most destructively, “the patriot loses all sense of the distinction between state, nation, and government.”

LYING AMERICANS INTO WAR

As this is being written the U.S. government is spreading the tall tale that the Syrian government allegedly killed some 100 of its own citizens with poison gas.  President Obama announced last year, quite conveniently, that that is what would cause him to “cross the line” and wage war on the Syrian government despite the fact that the Syrian government poses no threat of harm to any American.  It is a replay of the last lie to start a war – the Bush administration’s lie that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction” that somehow threatened Americans.  That was quickly proven to be a lie, but it was too late. As Randolph Bourne wrote, once a war is started most Americans become slavishly obedient to the warfare state and tend to believe all of is lies, no matter how spectacular they may be.  (The first Persian Gulf War of the early 1990s was partly “justified” by the lie that Iraqi soldiers were pulling the plugs in hospital nurseries where prematurely-born Kuwaiti babies were dying).

The War of 1812

Barely twenty years after the U.S. Constitution was ratified the “virus of imperialism” infected quite a few American politicians who believed it was their “manifest destiny” to invade and conquer Canada.  One of the congressional leaders of the early nineteenth-century war party, Henry Clay, celebrated the declaration of war on June 4, 1812, by declaring that “Every patriot bosom must throb with anxious solicitude for the result.  Every patriot arm will assist in making that result conducive to the glory of our beloved country” (David and Jeane Heidler, Henry Clay: The Essential American, p. 98).

Among the “official reasons” for the invasion of Canada in 1812 were the alleged “impressment” of American sailors by the British government, but that had been going on for decades, as Justin Raimondo has pointed out.  The tall tale was also broadcast that the “evil” British were encouraging Indians to attack American settlers.  The real reason for the war, however, was an impulse to grow the state with an imperialistic war of conquest.  The result of the war was a disaster – the British burned down the White House, the Library of Congress, and much of Washington, D.C.  Americans were saddled with a huge war debt that was used as an excuse to resurrect the corrupt and economically destabilizing Bank of the United States, a precursor of the Fed.

The Mexican-American War

When James K. Polk became president in 1845 he announced to his cabinet that one of his chief objectives was to acquire California, which was then a part of Mexico.  As he wrote in his diary (online as “The Diary of James K. Polk”), “I stated to the cabinet that up to this time as they knew, we had heard of no open act of aggression by the Mexican army, but that the danger was imminent that such acts would be committed.  I said that in my opinion we had ample cause of war.”

Thus, long before the presidency of George W. Bush, James K, Polk advocated the neocon notion of “pre-emptive war.”  Polk recognized that the Mexican army had not committed any “act of aggression,” so set out to provoke one by sending American troops to the border of Mexico in territory that historians agree was “disputed territory” at the time because of a very dubious claim by the U.S. government.  None other than Ulysses S. Grant wrote in his memoirs that, as a young soldier serving under the command of General Zachary Taylor during the 1846-1848 Mexican-American War, he understood that he had been sent there to provoke a fight:

“The presence of United States troops on the edge of the disputed territory furthest from the Mexican settlements, was not sufficient to provoke hostilities.  We were sent to provoke a fight, but it was essential that Mexico should commence it.  I was very doubtful whether Congress would declare war; but if Mexico should attack our troops, the Executive [President Polk] could announce, ‘Whereas  war exist by the acts of, etc.’ and prosecute the contest with vigor.”

Polk’s gambit worked; he did provoke the Mexican army.  In his war message to Congress he then declared that “Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil. . . .  As war exists . . . by the act of Mexico herself, we are called upon by every consideration of duty and patriotism to vindicate with decision the honor, the rights, and the interests of our country.”   This con game of provoking a war by showing up on another nation’s border, heavily armed with weapons aimed at the hoped-for belligerent, would be repeated many times in subsequent generations, right up to today’s provocation of a war in Syria.

The invasion and conquest of Mexico enabled the U.S. government to acquire California and New Mexico at the cost of some 15,000 American lives and at least 25,000 Mexican casualties.  It was an aggressive war of conquest and imperialism.

The American “Civil War”

In his first inaugural address on March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln threatened “invasion” and “bloodshed” (his exact words) in any state that refused to collect the federal tariff tax on imports, which had just been more than doubled two days earlier.  At the time, tariffs accounted for more than 90 percent of all federal tax revenue, so this was a gigantic tax increase.  This is how Lincoln threatened war in his first official oration:

“The power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.”

But of course the states of the lower South, having seceded, did not intend to “collect the duties and imposts” and send the money to Washington, D.C.  Lincoln committed treason (as defined by Article 3, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution) by levying war upon the free and independent states, which he always considered to be a part of the American union.  By his own admission (and his subsequent actions), he invaded his own country over tax collection.

The Republican Party of 1860 was the party of protectionism and high tariffs. The Confederate Constitution had outlawed protectionist tariffs altogether.  The result would have been a massive diversion of world trade to the Southern ports which would have forced the U.S. government to reduce its desired 50 percent average tariff rate to competitive levels (10-15 percent), depriving Northern manufacturers of this veiled form of corporate welfare, and depriving the government of the revenue it needed to pursue its “manifest destiny” of a mercantilist empire complete with massive subsidies for railroad corporations (among others).

Lincoln’s dilemma was that he knew he would be condemned worldwide for waging a bloody war over tax collection.  Another excuse for war had to be invented, so he invented the notion of the “mystical,” permanent, and non-voluntary union.  He did not want to be seen as the aggressor in his war for tariff revenue, so he hatched a plot to trick Southerners into firing the first shot by sending American warships to Charleston Harbor while steadfastly refusing to meet with Confederate peace commissioners or discuss the purchase of federal property by the Confederate government.  He understood that the Confederates would not tolerate a foreign fort on their property any more than George Washington would have tolerated a British fort in New York or Boston Harbors.

Quite a few Northern newspapers recognized the game Lincoln was playing.  On April 16, 1861the Buffalo Daily Courier editorialized that “The affair at Fort Sumter . . has been planned as a means by which the war feeling at the North should be intensified” (Howard Cecil Perkis, Northern Editorials on Secession).  The New York Evening Day Book wrote on April 17, 1861, that the event at Fort Sumter was “a cunningly devised scheme” contrived “to arouse, and, if possible, exasperate the northern people against the South.”  “Look at the facts,” the Providence Daily Post wrote on April 13, 1861.  “For three weeks the [Lincoln] administration newspapers have been assuring us that Ford Sumter would be abandoned,” but “Mr. Lincoln saw an opportunity to inaugurate civil war without appearing in the character of an aggressor.”  The Jersey City American Standard editorialized that “there is a madness and ruthlessness” in Lincoln’s behavior, concluding that Lincolns sending of ships to Charleston Harbor was “a pretext for letting loose the horrors of war.”

After Fort Sumter, on May 1, 1861, Lincoln wrote to his naval commander, Captain Gustavus Fox, to say that “You and I both anticipated that the cause of the country [i.e., a civil war] would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Fort Sumter, even if it should fail; and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by the result.”  He was thanking Captain Fox for his role in duping the Confederates into firing upon Fort Sumter (where no one was either killed or wounded).  He was thanking Captain Fox for his assistance in

starting the war.  Lincoln responded with a full-scale invasion of all the Southern states and a four-year war that, according to the latest research, was responsible for as many as 850,000 American deaths with more than double that number maimed for life.

The Spanish-American War

Immediately after the “Civil War” the U.S. government waged a twenty-five-year war of genocide against the Plains Indians “to make way for the railroad corporations,” as General Sherman declared (See my Independent Review article, “Violence in the American West: Myth versus Reality”).  Then by the late 1880s  American imperialists wanted to kick the Spanish out of Cuba where American business interests had invested in sugar and tobacco plantations.  An American warship, the U.S.S. Maine, was sent to Havana in January of 1898 to supposedly protect American business interests from an insurrection.  On February 15, 1898, a mysterious explosion sunk the ship, killing 270 sailors.  The Spanish were blamed for the explosion despite a lack of incriminating evidence.  “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” newspaperman William Randolph Hearst famously said to the artist Frederic Remington, implying that, armed with the artist’s illustrations, his newspapers would generate war propaganda.  The U.S. government waged war with Spain occupied Cuba for the next four years, making the world safe for American sugar and tobacco corporations.

World War I

In 1915 a German submarine sunk the RMS Lusitania, a British ship that was supposedly a civilian cruise ship.  About one-hundred Americans were on board, which enabled President Woodrow Wilson to copy Lincoln’s war tactic and use the sinking of the ship to argue for war.  Before the sinking of the Lusitania Wilson knew that the ship was carrying arms but refused to issue warnings to American passengers that, since Britain and Germany were at war, it could be risky to be a passenger on the Lusitania.  He used the sinking of the ship to excite anti-German hysteria and persuade the Congress to have the U.S enter the European war.  In 2008 a diving expedition discovered that the Lusitania held more than four million rounds of rifle ammunition, much of which was packed away in boxes labeled “cheese” or “butter” or “oysters.”

The Pearl Harbor Deception

Robert Stinnett, author of Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, is a World War II veteran who had a career as a journalist with the Oakland Tribune and BBC for several decades after the war.  He researched his book upon discovering, in 1993, that the U.S. Naval Security Group Command had decided to place into public archives at the University of Maryland hundreds of thousands of Japanese military messages obtained by U.S. monitoring/spying stations prior to Pearl Harbor.  These records had not been seen by anyone since 1941.

What Stinnett found was that, just as the vast majority of Northerners did not favor war on the eve of Fort Sumter in 1861, the vast majority of Americans eighty years later supported the America First non-interventionist movement led by Charles Lindbergh.  Eighty percent of the American public was non-interventionist in 1940-1941.  After Germany “made a strategic error” by signing a treaty with Japan,, a U.S. Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum of Naval Intelligence apparently saw an opportunity to counter the America First movement by provoking Japan into attacking the United States and getting the public behind war.

Using the government’s own sources, Stinnett found that President Franklin D. Roosevelt adopted an Office of Naval Intelligence plan to provoke Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor with an eight-point plan, the most important of which was keeping most of the U.S. fleet parked as sitting ducks at Pearl Harbor.  When the commander of the U.S. fleet, Admiral James Richardson, objected to allowing his sailors to be slaughtered by the Japanese, FDR fired Richardson and replaced him with Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel.

FDR implemented the entire eight-point plan but kept Admiral Kimmel and General Walter Short, commander of U.S. Army troops in Hawaii, in the dark.  Over 1,000 Japanese messages per day were intercepted by the U.S. Navy, which knew in advance everything the Japanese were doing in the Pacific on their way to Pearl Harbor.  They knew in advance that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941.  Kimmel and Short were even given direct orders by FDR himself, Stinnett found, to “remain in a defensive posture” because “the United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act.”

On October 30, 2000, President Bill Clinton signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act that, among many other things, acknowledged that Kimmel and Short were denied crucial military intelligence about the Japanese fleet prior to the Pearl Harbor attack.  Kimmel and Short were fired by FDR after the attack, but were exonerated fifty-nine years later.

The Gulf of Tonkin “Incidents”

Shortly before his assassination in November of 1963 President John F. Kennedy had begun recalling U.S. military “advisors” from Vietnam.  His successor, Lyndon Johnson, was hell bent on waging total war in Vietnam.  Once again the American public had little interest in a civil war thousands of miles away in Asia, but were easily duped into acquiescing in one.  Once again the ruse involved mysterious occurrences involving battle ships in the middle of nowhere, where the only accounts of the incidents came from the U.S government.

The U.S. government began “covertly” supplying gunboats to the South Vietnamese army which were used to attack the coast of North Vietnam.  This was acknowledged in 1964 by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.  In addition,

American warships hovered around North Vietnamese ports.  This included the USS Maddox.  Placing the ships in harm’s way was Johnson’s FDR-type strategy to provoke an attack by the North Vietnamese, and it succeeded.

Johnson falsely claimed that there was a second attack on the USS Maddox, but that is acknowledged to be a hoax.   Naval sonar picked up American propeller noise, and radar showed images caused by bad weather, not North Vietnamese gunboats.  Johnson nevertheless made a radio speech describing a second “attack” and called for military retaliation.  Soon thereafter he ordered air strikes.  In a 2003 television documentary entitled “The Fog of War” Robert McNamara admitted that the second attack on the Maddox “never happened.”

It may seem trite, but it is nevertheless true that those who fail to learn the lessons of history are bound to repeat its mistakes.  Americans are about to repeat the same mistake of squandering their blood and treasure on another military adventure (in Syria) that has nothing whatsoever to do with defending American freedom – or anyone else’s.

To study imperialism and anti-imperialism more intensely, consider signing up for my new five-week online course on the subject through the Mises Academy beginning the evening of September 9.

The Downtowner is always fully booked and for good reason; the young drivers are prompt, exceptionally polite and courteous, and it’s free! What a great way to start your post-college career as an entrepreneur. Not surprisingly, the city government of Delray Beach is apparently doing everything it can to drive The Downtowner out of business.

The Downtowner may soon be history, and the young entrepreneurs unemployed, because in its never-ending quest to provide corporate welfare for politically-connected downtown merchants, the city government spent over $1 million to purchase two large buses called “Roundabouts” that run a fixed route and operate for “free.” Of course, it’s not really free — the cost is just hidden from view; all salaries and capital costs are paid for by taxpayers. Since it is difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to compete with a government enterprise that has all of its capital and personnel costs paid for by the taxpayers, the days of The Downtowner may be limited. At least it hasn’t been banned altogether — yet. That was the fate of early-twentieth-century “jitneys” (fixed-route taxis) that were legally banned all throughout the U.S. with the advent of city government-run buses.

The Delray Beach city government claimed that the purpose of the “Roundabouts” is to stimulate local business and reduce traffic congestion. It is an example of a “bootleggers and Baptists” coalition, in other words. Economist Bruce Yandle coined the phrase to describe the proponents of alcohol prohibition in the 1920s: Bootleggers wanted prohibition because it kept them in business, and “Baptists” represented people who opposed alcohol consumption for religious reasons. In this case the “bootleggers” are local merchants who think government-subsidized bus service will bring them more business; the “Baptists” are environmentalists and urban planners who think the buses will reduce traffic congestion and air pollution.

But politicians have no business taxing one group of citizens — taxpayers — in order to provide a veiled form of corporate welfare to other, better politically-connected citizens — downtown merchants. Moreover, the buses create more traffic congestion, not less, because of their very existence. The Downtowner already reduced traffic congestion. If there is a need for more competition — and there always is — then that is the job of other private-sector entrepreneurs, not politicians looking to line their campaign coffers with “contributions” from local merchants.

The law of unintended consequences recently added an element of farce to the saga of the Delray Beach “Roundabouts.” It seems that they have being running empty most of the day and night except for a group of homeless people who have decided that sitting in an air-conditioned bus all afternoon is better than being out on the street in the middle of the summer in South Florida. This has caused a panic among the city’s political dispensers of corporate welfare because the homeless people are apparently deterring others from using the Roundabouts, the ostensible reason for the million dollar boondoggle in the first place. The politicians are afraid that city taxpayers might start questioning the propriety of using tax dollars to run empty buses (except for one or two homeless persons) back and forth through town all day and night, so they are proposing to start charging $1 each way.

The best use for the Delray Beach Roundabouts would be to take them out to sea and dump them some place where they can form a reef and fish habitat. It will be good for the environment and good for (non-subsidized) business in the city.

No respectable historian believes the Deep North/government school fantasy that enlightened and morally-superior Northerners elected Abe Lincoln so that they could go to war and die by the hundreds of thousands solely for the benefit of black strangers in the “deep South.”  And Thomas Fleming is as “respectable” as one gets in terms of contemporary writers of history.  Fleming has discovered what scholars such as the late, great Murray Rothbard and the not-late-but-still-great Clyde Wilson wrote about many years ago: A war was not necessary to end slavery – the rest of the world did it peacefully; only 6 percent of adult Southern men owned slaves, which means that the average Confederate soldier was not fighting to preserve a system that actually harmed him and his family economically; and that the real cause of the war was what Fleming calls a “malevolent envy” of the South by New England “Yankees” who waged a war of economic conquest. In his own words, from the inside front cover of A Disease in the Public Mind:

[Northern] hatred for Southerners long predated their objections to
slavery.  Abolitionists were convinced that New England, whose
spokesmen had begun the American Revolution, should have been
the leaders of the new nation.  Instead, they had been displaced by
Southern “slavocrats” like Thomas Jefferson.

The inside cover of the book asks, “Why was the United States the only nation in the world to fight a war to end slavery?”  The standard “answer” to this question, which I have asked many times in my own writings, is that Southern plantation owners were by far the most evil human beings in world history, far more evil than British slave owners, Spanish slave owners, or French, Danish , Dutch and Portugese slave owners.  Therefore, no peaceful means of ending slavery was ever possible.  This of course makes no sense at all, and Thomas Fleming recognizes it.

He points out that “Only 316,632 Southerners owned slaves – a mere 6 percent of the total white population.”  This leads Fleming to ask the obvious question:  “Why did the vast majority of the white population unite behind these slaveholders in this fratricidal war?  Why did they sacrifice over 300,000 of their sons to preserve an institution in which they apparently had no personal stake?”

Fleming actually understates this point:  Slavery only benefited the slave-owners who exploited the slaves but was economically harmful to all the rest of Southern society because slave labor is inherently inferior to free labor.  The entire South was poorer as a result.  Moreover, the average Confederate soldier, who was a yeoman farmer who owned no slaves, was harmed by the slave-owning plantation owners through unfair competition.  That is why so many Northern states like Illinois banned the migration of blacks, free or slave, from their borders, and it is also the main reason why the Republican Party opposed the extension of slavery into the new territories – they wanted to “preserve them for free white labor,” as Lincoln himself once said.  In every major Civil War battle Confederate soldiers who did not own slaves fought against (mostly border state) Union Army soldiers, such as Ulysses S. Grant, who did own slaves (Grant’s wife Julia, cousin of Confederate General James Longstreet, inherited slaves from her South Carolina family and Grant was the overseer of his father-in-law’s slave plantation for a period of time before the war).

Fleming contends that the real reason for the war – and for why, of all the nations on earth, only the U.S. associated war with the ending of slavery – was twofold:  First, there was the extreme “malevolent envy” of Southerners by the New England “Yankee” political class, who had long believed that they were God’s chosen people and that they should rule America, if not the rest of the world.    Second, there were a mere 25 or so very influential New England abolitionists who had abandoned Christianity and even condemned Jesus Christ, while embracing the mentally insane mass murderer John Brown as their “savior.”  This is part of the “disease in the public mind” that is the theme of Fleming’s book.

John Brown, who had declared himself to be a communist, had organized terrorist attacks in Kansas which included the murder of entire families who did not own slaves, and the murder of free black men.  “Perhaps most appalling,” writes Fleming, “were the murders of James P. Doyle and his two oldest sons, while Doyle’s wife, Mahala, pleaded frantically for their lives . . . .  The Doyles were immigrants from Tennessee who . . . had no interest in owning slaves.”  Brown claimed that his purpose was “to strike terror into the hearts of the proslavery people.”  He planned even larger acts of terrorism at Harpers’ Ferry in 1859 where he was apprehended by U.S. Marines led by Colonel Robert E. Lee, and he was hanged for his crimes.

Fleming discusses in great detail how John Brown came to replace Jesus Christ in the minds of Northern abolitionists, who adopted his mantra that blood must shed in order to eradicate sin.  That is, if they were to be saved and sent to Heaven, there must be bloodshed, and the more the better.   That is why peaceful emancipation was not achieved in America, writes Fleming: It was not stubborn and evil Southern plantation owners who were the problem, it was the bloodthirsty abolitionists.

John Brown “descended from Puritans” and was “the personification of a Puritan,” says Fleming.  And he truly became a “god” to the New England “Yankees.”  “Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed awe and near-worship of John Brown,” writes Fleming.  He lavished praise on John Brown’s “religion of violence.”   Emerson called Brown “that new saint” who “would make the gallows as glorious as the cross.”  Henry David Thoreau said that “Brown was Jesus.”  He was “the bravest and humanest man in the country,” said Thoreau with horribly clunky English. He described Brown in that way after learning of Brown’s execution of non-slaveowning, innocents in front of their wives and children.  These men were clearly crazy, and their writings must have contributed a great deal to the “disease in the public mind.”

The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was also a John Brown worshipper. As a typical New England Yankee Garrison possessed “the prevailing attitude” of New Englanders in that “they were inclined to believe in the moral depravity of anyone who disagreed with them,” and had “an almost total lack of empathy” for their fellow countrymen in other parts of the country.  This, says Fleming, was “a flaw that permeated the New England view of the rest of America.”

An abolitionist compatriot of Garrison’s named Henry C. Wright declared that Jesus Christ was a “dead failure” for allowing slavery to exist, and insisted that “John Brown would be a power far more efficient” than Christ.  Armed with such beliefs, Garrison and comrades waged a decades-long campaign of hatred against all Southerners.  Their newspapers broadcast for decades that the South was “a province ruled by Satan” and was guilty of “four unforgiveable sins: violence, drunkenness, laziness, and sexual depravity.”  “From Richmond to New Orleans, the Southern states are one great Sodom,” wrote one New England publication.  Fleming writes that such frantic “theological somersaults” were strikingly similar to “the public frenzy that gripped Massachusetts during the witch trials . . .”   And some people wonder why Southerners in 1861 no longer wanted to be part of a union that included New England Yankees.

Thomas Fleming has discovered historical truths that Clyde Wilson long ago wrote about.  In an essay entitled “The Yankee Problem in American History” Wilson pointed out that “by Yankee I do not mean everybody from north of the Potomac and Ohio.  Lots of them have always been good folks.”  He, like others before him, used “the term [Yankee] historically to designate that peculiar ethnic group descended from New Englanders, who can be easily recognized by their arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, and lack of congeniality, [and] for ordering other people around . . . .  They are the chosen saints whose mission is to make America, and the world, into the perfection of their own image.”  “Hillary Rodham Clinton,” Clyde Wilson continues, “is a museum-quality specimen of the Yankee – self-righteous, ruthless, and self-aggrandizing.”

By 1860, writes Wilson, “The North had been Yankeeized, for the most part quietly, by control of churches, schools, and other cultural institutions, by whipping up a frenzy of paranoia about the alleged plot of the South to spread slavery to the North,” the theme of Abe Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech.  Of course, that was never the plan and never a possibility, but the “diseased” public mind of the North, fueled by the slick political rhetoric of politicians like Lincoln, actually persuaded many in the North.

Clyde Wilson describes abolitionism in almost an identical fashion that Thomas Fleming does:

Abolitionism, despite what has been said later, was not based on
Sympathy for the  black people nor on an ideal of natural rights.
It was based on the hysterical conviction that Southern slaveholders
Were evil sinners who stood in the way of fulfillment of America’s driving
Mission to establish Heaven on Earth . . . .  Most abolitionists had
Little knowledge or interest in black people or knowledge of life in
The South . . . . many abolitionists expected that evil Southern whites and
Blacks would disappear and the land repopulated by virtuous Yankees.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of these.  He once predicted that since black people were, in his opinion, and “inferior race,” they would eventually “go the way of the Dodo Bird” and become extinct.

A Disease in the Public Mind is filled with scorn for the abolitionists and their un-American beliefs, including their belief of the inferiority of black people.  By failing to know anything at all about Southern society, never spending any time there, writes Fleming, the abolitionists did not understand that many of the slaves were highly skilled and talented blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers, farmers, and artisans of all sorts.  This ignorance has led generations of Yankees, including many of today’s “liberals,” to believe that because of slavery, the descendants of slaves “would have to be treated like children, at best, or creatures from an alien planet at worst.”

Thomas Fleming would likely be in complete agreement with Murray Rothbard, as well as Clyde Wilson, on the nature of mid-nineteenth century “Yankees.”  Rothbard wrote in his essay, “Just War,” that:

[T]he North’s driving force, the ‘Yankees’—that ethnocultural group
who either lived in New England or migrated from there to upstate
New York, northern and eastern Ohio, northern Indiana, and northern
Illinois – had been swept by . . . a fanatical and emotional neo-Puritanism
driven by a fervent ‘postmillenialism’ which held that as a precondition
dor the Second Advent of Jesus Christ, man must set up a thousand-
year Kingdom of God on Earth.  The Kingdom is to be a perfect society.
In order to be perfect, of course, this Kingdom must be free of sin . . . .  If
you didn’t . . . stamp out sin by force you yourself would not be saved
(emphasis added).

This is why, said Rothbard, the “Northern war against slavery partook of a fanatical millennialist fervor, of a cheerful willingness to uproot institutions, to commit mayhem and mass murder, to plunder and loot and destroy, all in the name of high moral principle.  They were Pattersonian humanitarians with the guillotine: the Anabaptists, the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks of their era.”

Thomas Fleming points out that the husband of Julia Ward Howe, author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was one of the financiers of John Brown’s terrorist mass murder sprees.  Her song replaced “John Brown’s Body” as the Yankee anthem as it celebrated the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens as “the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Thomas Fleming discusses many other historical facts in A Disease in the Public Mind that yours truly has also written about and been denounced as a liar, a slavery defender, a “Neo-Confederate,” and worse.  He praises Thomas Jefferson for being among the first American statesmen to propose the peaceful emancipation of Southern slaves.  He describes in detail the breathtaking hypocrisy of New Englanders who “rediscovered the sacred union,” he writes sarcastically, after having plotted to secede from the union for a dozen years after Jefferson’s election as president.

Fleming also writes of how the “Yankees” habitually attempted to plunder the South with protectionist tariffs that protected their manufacturers from competition.  He understood that the Republican Party’s opposition to the extension of slavery into the new territories was based on their wish of “Free Soil for Free (White) Men,” the title of chapter 19.  That is, they wanted a Homestead Act that would hand out free land to white settlers while banning the existence of all black people, free or slave.  He quotes Lincoln’s letter to Horace Greeley explaining that his “paramount objective” was to “save the union” and not to end slavery.

In his final chapter Thomas Fleming writes about Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was an officer in Lincoln’s army who was wounded in battle.  After the war, “For seventy years, he repeatedly condemned the abolitionists and others who claimed they had a message from some higher power that everyone had to obey.  Above all he voiced his contempt for people whose claim to certitude often persuaded other men to kill each other.”  If this sounds familiar, it is because it has been the guiding principle of American foreign policy ever since 1865.

“During the weeks following the [1860] election, [Northern newspaper] editors of all parties assumed that secession as a constitutional right was not in question . . . . On the contrary, the southern claim to a right of peaceable withdrawal was countenanced out of reverence for the natural law principle of government by consent of the governed.”

~ Howard Cecil Perkins, editor, Northern Editorials on Secession, p. 10

The first several generations of Americans understood that the Declaration of Independence was the ultimate states’ rights document. The citizens of the states would delegate certain powers to a central government in their Constitution, and these powers (mostly for national defense and foreign policy purposes) would hopefully be exercised for the benefit of the citizens of the “free and independent” states, as they are called in the Declaration.

The understanding was that if American citizens were in fact to be the masters rather than the servants of government, they themselves would have to police the national government that was created by them for their mutual benefit. If the day ever came that the national government became the sole arbiter of the limits of its own powers, then Americans would live under a tyranny as bad or worse than the one the colonists fought a revolution against. As the above quotation denotes, the ultimate natural law principle behind this thinking was Jefferson’s famous dictum in the Declaration of Independence that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that whenever that consent is withdrawn the people of the free and independent states, as sovereigns, have a duty to abolish that government and replace it with a new one if they wish.

This was the fundamental understanding of the meaning of the Declaration of Independence – that it was a Declaration of Secession from the British empire – of the first several generations of Americans. As the 1, 107-page book, Northern Editorials on Secession shows, this view was held just as widely in the Northern states as in the Southern states in 1860-1861. Among the lone dissenters was Abe Lincoln, a corporate lawyer/lobbyist/politician with less than a year of formal education who probably never even read The Federalist Papers.

The following are some illustrations of how various Northern-state newspaper editors thought of the meaning of the Declaration of Independence in 1860-1861:

On November 21, 1860, he Cincinnati Daily Press wrote that:

We believe that the right of any member of this Confederacy [the United States] to dissolve its political relations with the others and assume an independent position is absolute – that, in other words, if South Carolina wants to go out of the Union, she has the right to do so, and no party or power may justly say her nay. This we suppose to be the doctrine of the Declaration of Independence when it affirms that governments are instituted for the protection of men in their lives, liberties, and the pursuit of happiness; and that ‘whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government . . .’

On December 17, 1860 the New York Daily Tribune editorialized that “We have repeatedly asked those who dissent from our view of this matter [the legality of peaceful secession] to tell us frankly whether they do or do not assent to Mr. Jefferson’s statement in the Declaration of Independence that governments ‘derive their just powers from the consent of the governed . . . . We do heartily accept this doctrine, believing it intrinsically sound, beneficent, and one that , universally accepted, is calculated to prevent the shedding of seas of human blood.” Furthermore, the Tribune wrote, “[I]f it justified the secession from the British Empire of Three Millions of colonists in 1776, we do not see it would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861.”

The Kenosha, Wisconsin Democrat editorialized on January 11, 1861, that “The founders of our government were constant secessionists. They not only claimed the right for themselves, but conceded it to others. They were not only secessionists in theory, but in practice.. The old confederation between the states [the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union] was especially declared perpetual by the instrument itself. Yet Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and the hosts of heroes and statesman of that day seceded from it.” And, “The Constitution provides no means of coercing a state in the Union; nor any punishment for secession.”

Again on February 23, 1861, the New York Daily Tribune reiterated its view that “We must not, in behalf of either of the Union of Freedom, trample down the great truth that ‘governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed.’”

The Washington, D.C. States and Union newspaper editorialized on March 21, 1861, that “The people are the ruling judges, the States independent sovereigns. Where the people chose to change their political condition, as our own Declaration of Independence first promulgated, they have a right to do so. If the doctrine was good then, it is good now. Call that right by whatever name you please, secession or revolution, it makes no sort of difference.”

This last sentence was a response to the Republican Party propaganda machine of the day that invented the theory that the Declaration allows for a “right of revolution” but not a right of “secession.” The States and Union recognized immediately that this non-distinction was nothing more than a rhetorical flimflam designed to deceive the public about the meaning of their own Declaration of Independence. It is a piece of lying propaganda that is repeated to this day by apologists for the American welfare/warfare/police state, especially the Lincoln-worshipping neocons at National Review, the Claremont Institute, and other appendages of the Republican Party.

On the eve of the war the Providence, Rhode Island Evening Press warned that “the employment of [military] force” against citizens who no longer consented to being governed by Washington, D.C. , “can have no other result than to make the revolution itself complete and lasting, at the expense of thousands of lives, hundreds of millions of dollars, and amount of wretchedness fearful to contemplate, and the humiliation of the American name.”

The Evening Press then reminded its readers that in the American Revolution the colonists rejected “the Divine right of Kings” to do whatever they wanted to their subjects. “Our forefathers disputed this dictum,” they wrote, and “rose against it, fought against it, and by successful revolution accomplished their independence of it. In its place they substituted the doctrine that ‘to secure human happiness, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .”

On this Fourth of July most Americans will not be celebrating or commemorating these founding, natural law principles. To the extent that they are celebrating anything but a day off work to overeat and overdrink, they will be celebrating the imperial warfare/police state with hundreds of parades featuring marching soldiers in camouflage, flags galore, military vehicles, jet fighter fly-overs, “patriotic”/warmongering musical anthems, etc. The symbol of all of this is King Lincoln himself, who rejected every single principle of the Declaration of Independence. His successors have reinterpreted the document to “justify” endless military interventionism all over the globe in the name of “making all men everywhere equal.” To the neocons, this means perpetual wars for “democracy.” This of course has nothing whatsoever to do with the real meaning of the Declaration of Independence and is in fact the exact opposite. No people in any country that has been invaded and occupied by the U.S. military have ever consented to being governed as such by Washington, D.C. As such, they can all be thought of as Neo-Confederates.

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When Obama went before the United Nations on September 12, 2012 to declare that the Syrian regime “must end” and threatened U.S. military intervention to achieve that end he did not cite the U.S. Constitution as his authority. No American president ever does when threatening military intervention. Instead, he invoked the rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln or what the late Professor Mel Bradford called “the rhetoric of continuing revolution.” More specifically, in his U.N. speech he paraphrased Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to say that U.S. military intervention is warranted because “government of the people, by the people, and for the people is more likely to bring about the stability, prosperity, and individual opportunity that serve as a basis for peace in the world.” Obama repeated this hoary theme – that Lincoln’s rhetoric “justifies” or “legitimizes” endless American military interventionism all over the world – in his first inaugural address. “What makes us exceptional,” he shouted, “is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago . . .” This “idea” was not, of course, the Constitution and not even the Declaration of Independence, but a few words from the Declaration taken out of historical context. The words are the “all men are created equal” phrase.

Nothing could be further from the truth than Lincoln’s notion that America was founded on the idea of egalitarianism. The essential principles of the Constitution were based on the freedom of individuals from governmental control of their lives, not “equality” however it may be defined. If government is to have a role in society, said the founders, it is to protect lives, liberty and property, not to promote “equality” (which Lincoln unequivocally did not believe in in any case). It is this “rhetoric of continuing revolution” that the American state has invoked for more than a century now to “legitimize” all of its powers, especially its endless aggressive wars. It is the opponents of endless military interventionism, men like Ron Paul, who alternatively invoke the Constitution as defining the legitimate role of government in society. The myths, legends, and superstitions surrounding the story of Abraham Lincoln (“Father Abraham,” as the neocons are fond of calling him) are what are used to legitimize the power of the American warfare/welfare state, not the Constitution. This fact explains the odd but perfectly predictable occurrence of recent hysteria among the neocons, especially one Rich Lowry of National Review magazine, over criticisms of the Lincoln dictatorship by yours truly and many others. They have become strangely unglued and freaked out over the fact that many young Americans, especially, no longer buy into the standard propaganda line that is always invoked to “justify” more war, more killing, more debt, taxes, inflation, spying, and other attacks on civil liberties. The neocons are still punch drunk, in other words, from how the Ron Paul phenomenon, during the congressman’s two attempts at securing the Republican Party presidential nomination, captured the imaginations of millions of young people and continues to do so.

One of the clearest examples of the importance the neocons assign to the Lincoln legend in supporting never-ending war is a small book by an American Enterprise Institute neocon named Walter Berns. His book is entitled Making Patriots. In an important chapter on Lincoln mythology Berns bemoans the fact that too many of today’s youth are too hesitant to join in the neocons’ crusades to overthrow governments in place like Syria, Lebanon, Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere. They are too selfish and self-centered, says Berns, being so preoccupied with their own education, careers, and families. They must be mesmerized into the fascist/neocon militaristic mindset by some kind of “national poet,” says Walter Berns. “Fortunately,” he says, we already have such a “poet” in the political rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln. “Making Cannon Fodder” would thus be a more appropriate title for Berns’ book. In his essay on “The Nature of the State” Murray Rothbard pointed out that all states, no matter how tyrannical they may be, rely crucially on inculcating in the minds of the public the alleged grandiosity of the state and the alleged failures of private enterprise and the civil society. That’s why the state and its court historians and other apologists (such as the neocon magazine writers, talking heads, and court intellectuals) spend so much time and effort trying to dominate the educational system and the domain of “acceptable” public discourse.

Such propaganda is essential to statism, said Rothbard, because it is essentially an economical way to get the public to acquiesce in being enslaved by the state. It is much cheaper and less risky than other historical means, such as terrorizing and mass murdering one’s own citizens, thereby risking a violent revolution (See Death by Government by R.J. Rummel). Lincoln mythology is the propagandistic cornerstone of American statism and has been for generations. It is why politicians like Obama always fall back on the rhetoric of “American exceptionalism” to “justify” their endless wars and military adventurism. The neocons are becoming unglued and freaked out because they no longer control the culture of ideas among “conservatives” as they did when the former CIA employee William F. Buckley, Jr. was at the helm of their flagship magazine. No longer can the ideas of a Frank Meyer, one of the founders of National Review who was a harsh critic of Lincoln, be thrown down the memory hole. There are too many independent scholars who are more interested in pursuing the truth than in “spinning” 150-year-old political rhetoric to “justify” the scheming plans of the military/industrial/congressional complex. Young people especially are concerned about the erosion of civil liberties and have become highly suspicious of tired old, belligerent neocons like Harry Jaffa and his followers (like Rich Lowry) who assure them that NSA spying, warrantless wiretaps, state snooping on all financial transactions, censorship of the internet, and intimidation of the media is all kosher because, after all, “Father Abraham” suspended Habeas Corpus, censored telegraph communications, and shut down opposition newspapers.

A prerequisite for the final collapse of the Soviet Union was the widespread disbelief in all the lies, myths and superstitions about socialism that the people of the Soviet empire had been brainwashed into accepting. Once no one any longer believed in socialism, the system was doomed despite all of its military might and all of the willingness of communist politicians to brutalize their own people. As Rothbard said, all state power ultimately rests on a body of ideas that occupy the minds of the citizens. That is what so terrifies the neocons like Rich Lowry: They know how absurd it sounds to America’s youth to hear Obama invoke THEIR rhetoric about the Declaration, government of the people, by the people, etc., and “American exceptionalism” to make his case for yet another war in yet another Middle East country that poses no threat whatsoever to them. More and more young Americans have come to understand that it is the warfare state, propped up by the neocon propaganda apparatus, that is the biggest threat to themselves and their futures.

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Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham (D-Ohio) was the original American “whistleblower.” Serving as a member of Congress from Dayton, Ohio during the War to Prevent Southern Independence, his criticisms of the Lincoln regime earned him the reputation as the leader of the Democratic opposition. The Republican Party smeared him (and all other opponents as a “copperhead” (a.k.a. snake in the grass). On May 5, 1863, sixty-seven heavily-armed soldiers broke into his home in the middle of the night and dragged him off to a military prison. This was done without any due process, as Lincoln had long ago illegally suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus. He was said to be guilty of “discouraging enlistments” in the army with his criticisms of the Lincoln regime. A military order issued in the state of Ohio declared all such speech to be illegal, and military officers were to have dictatorial powers in deciding what kind of speech would be permitted there. All of this was of course done at the direction of Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln apparently wanted Northerners to believe that all such critics were spies and traitors, so Congressman Vallandigham was deported to the state of Tennessee and placed in the hands of a Confederate Army commander. The Confederates considered him to be an “enemy alien” and imprisoned him in Wilmington, North Carolina for a short time. Vallandigham was released and made his way via blockade runner to Canada, where he spent the rest of the war.

The words that got Congressman Vallandigham deported are found in Speeches, Arguments, Addresses and Letters of Clement L. Vallandigham, first published in 1864 and reprinted and for sale today at Amazon.com. Vallandigham’s first salvo against the Lincoln administration was a July 10, 1861 speech delivered on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives entitled “Executive Usurpation.” In the speech he condemned Lincoln for “the wicked and hazardous experiment of calling thirty millions of people into arms among themselves, without the counsel and authority of Congress.”

As for Lincoln’s newly-invented theory that the American union was never voluntary, and that the founding fathers supposedly understood that if any state seceded the government would have a “right” to invade that state, murder its citizens by the tens of thousands, and bomb and burn its cities and towns to a smoldering ruin (as was the policy of the Lincoln administration), Vallandigham gave the Congress a history lesson. “He [Lincoln] omits to tell us that secession and disunion had a New England origin, and began in Massachusetts, in 1804, at the time of the Louisiana Purchase; were revived by the Hartford [Secession] Convention in 1814; and culminated during the [War of 1812] in [New Englanders] sending Commissioners to Washington, to settle the terms for a peaceable separation of New England from the other States of the Union.”

Congressman Vallandigham described Lincoln’s first inaugural address as having been spoken “with the forked tongue and crooked counsel of the New York politician [New York politician Thurlow Weed having been Lincoln’s campaign manager], leaving thirty millions of people in doubt whether it meant peace or war.” He condemned the Republican Party for opposing “all conciliation and compromise” with the Southern states, and surmised that the reason for it was “the necessities of a party in the pangs of dissolution.” They wanted a war to rally the people around their disintegrating party.

But a “more compelling” cause of the war, said the Ohio congressman, was “the passage of an obscure, ill-considered, ill-digested, and unstatesmanlike high protectionist tariff act, commonly known as the ‘Morrill Tariff.’” At about the same time, he noted, the Confederate government had outlawed protectionist tariffs altogether in its new Constitution. “The result was as inevitable as the laws of trade are inexorable. Trade and commerce . . . began to look South . . . . Threatened thus with the loss of bot political power and wealth, or the repeal of the tariff, and, at last, of both, New England –and Pennsylvania . . . demanded, now coercion and civil war, with all its horrors . . .”

Republican Party newspapers from all throughout the North had been calling for the bombardment of Southern ports before any state seceded, and Lincoln literally threatened war and “invasion” of any state that declined to pay the newly-doubled (two days earlier) federal tariff tax in his first inaugural address. “Honest” Abe threatened war over tax collection, and kept his word.

Another hidden purpose of the war was to “overthrow the present form of Federal-republican government, and to establish a strong centralized government in its stead. Thus, Vallandigham charged that this was not just the effect of the war, but its primary objective all along. All of this was being done, he said, to “revive and restore the falling fortunes of the Republican Party.”

The congressman harshly condemned Lincoln’s unconstitutional, illegal, and dictatorial actions, especially the suspension of Habeas Corpus, waging war without the consent of Congress, the mass imprisonment of Northern political dissenters, censorship of the telegraph, and the shutting down of hundreds of opposition newspapers in the North. Such behavior, he said, “would have cost any English sovereign his head at any time within the last two hundred years.”

Congressman Vallandigham mocked Lincoln’s contention that “he is only preserving and protecting the Constitution” by destroying it. This, he said, is “the tyrant’s plea.” “The Constitution cannot be preserved by violating it.” It was “an offense to the intelligence” of Congress for Lincoln to argue that “gross and multiplied infractions of the Constitution and usurpations of power were done by the president . . . out of pure love and devotion to the Constitution.” [This of course is still part of the mantra of the neocons at the Claremont Institute, National Review, and elsewhere).

Vallandigham also understood that the Republican Party was using the war as an excuse to ram through Congress the old Hamiltonian mercantilist system of massive economic interventionism and corporate welfare. He described it as "national banks, bankrupt laws, a vast and permanent public debt, high tariffs, heavy direct taxation, enormous expenditure, gigantic and stupendous peculation . . . No more state lines, no more state governments, but a consolidated monarchy or vast centralized military despotism." In today’s language all of this would be called "national greatness conservatism."

Congressman Vallandigham would continue his public criticisms of the Lincoln administration for the next two years, before finally being deported. On December 23, 1861, he informed his congressional colleagues that, just as he had predicted, a high protectionist tariff could reduce tariff revenues by diminishing trade from abroad too severely. "I predicted that the result of increasing the duties would be a great . . . diminution of the importations, and by consequence of the revenue from customs." But that of course is always the intent of protectionist tariffs – to cut off trade and competition from abroad, not to raise prodigious amounts of revenue.

On May 8, 1862 Vallandigham returned to the floor of the House of Representatives to draw sharp distinctions between the Democratic and Republican parties, which had become virtual opposites in their announced platforms. The Democrats differed from the Republicans in that they were in favor of: "The support of liberty as against power; of the people as against their agents and servants; and of State rights as against consolidation and centralized despotism a simple government; no public debt; low taxes; no high protectionist tariff; no general system of internal improvements [i.e. corporate welfare] by the Federal authority; no National Bank; hard money for the Federal public dues; no assumption of state debts; expansion of territory; self government for the Territories . . . ” Nothing could be further from the “national greatness conservatism” policies of the Lincoln administration. It is little wonder that Vallandigham was deported.

The congressman destroyed Lincoln’s argument that the American union was being “saved” by war by stating on August 2, 1862 that: “The president professes to think that the Union can be restored by arms. I do not. A Union founded on consent can never be cemented by force. This is the testimony of the Fathers.” On February 23, 1863, Vallandigham threw another rhetorical bomb at the administration by pointing out in another speech that the administration’s conscription law “is a confession that the people of the country are against this war. It is a solemn admission . . . that they will not voluntarily consent to wage it any longer.” Two weeks later, in a speech in New York City, Vallandigham was met with loud cheers when he declared that “instead of crushing out the rebellion,” the “effort has been to crush out the spirit of liberty” in the Northern states.

Six weeks before his imprisonment and deportation Vallandigham made some remarks at a March 21, 1863 meeting in Hamilton, Ohio, that must have been he last straw for the Lincoln dictatorship. The dictatorship had issued yet another military “general order” (General Order Number 15) – this time one that condemned the private ownership of firearms as “unnecessary, impolitic, and dangerous” and “a violation of civil law” as defined by the military authorites then occupying Ohio. “Are we a conquered province governed by a military proconsul?”, Vallandigham asked, “And has it come to this, that the Constitution is now suspended by a military General Order? “Yes” would have been the appropriate and obvious answer.

Congresman Clement L. Vallandiham was deported by the Lincoln dictatorship because every word of his eloquent critiques of their tyranny and his defenses of constitutional liberty was true. Every word and every speech disproved the false propaganda lines invented by the Republican Party to “justify” its power – that the Constitution must be first destroyed in order to save it; that the voluntary union of the founders could be “saved” by mass murdering hundreds of thousands of citizens who no longer consented to being governed by Washington, D.C.; that high tariffs, high taxes, out-of-control government spending, and stupendous public debt would cause prosperity; that corporate welfare was good for taxpayers; that a national bank run by politicians was in the public interest, etc., etc. All of these lies are still repeated ad nauseam today under the rubric of “Lincoln scholarship.” It is no mere coincidence that so many of those who still repeat these hoary government propaganda tales are also busy defending the spying and prying police state.

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After writing two books and dozens of articles, and giving hundreds of radio and television interviews and public presentations on the subject of Lincoln and the political economy of the American “Civil War”over the past fifteen years, I have realized that the only thing the average American knows about the subject is a few slogans that we are all subjected to in elementary school. I was taught in public elementary school in Pennsylvania that Abe was so honest that he once walked six miles to return a penny to a merchant who undercharged him (and six miles back home). He was supposedly so tendered hearted that he cried after witnessing the death of a turkey. He suffered in silence his entire life after witnessing slavery as a teenager (While everyone else in the country was screaming over the issue). And of course he was “a champion of democracy, an apostle of racial equality, and a paragon of social justice,” Joseph Fallon writes in his important new, must-read book, Lincoln Uncensored.

This view of Lincoln, writes Fallon, is only true “in official histories or in Hollywood movies” but not in reality. The reason for this historical disconnect is that “this myth of Lincoln, not the Constitution . . . now confers legitimacy on the political system of the United States.” Despite being mostly a bundle of lies, it is nevertheless the ideological cornerstone of statism in America and has been for nearly 150 years.

The real Lincoln was a dictator and a tyrant who shredded the Constitution, fiendishly orchestrated the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens, and did it all for the economic benefit of the special interests who funded the Republican Party (and his own political career). But don’t take Joseph Fallon’s or Thomas DiLorenzo’s word for it. Read the words of Abe Lincoln himself. That is what Fallon allows everyone to do in his great work of scholarship, Lincoln Uncensored. No longer do Americans need to rely on politically-correct, heavily state-censored textbooks or movies made by communistic-minded Hollywood hedonists to learn about this part of their own country’s history.

Each of the twenty-three chaptes of Lincoln Uncensored explains the real Lincoln in Lincoln’s own words by quoting him directly from The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (CW), complete with specific citations for every single quotation. The following is an abbreviated sampling of what you will learn upon reading Lincoln Uncensored.

LINCOLN WAS AN OBSESSIVE WHITE SUPREMACIST

“Free them [blacks] and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this . . . . We can not then make them equals.” (CW, Vol. II, p. 256).

“There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races” (CW, Vol. II, p. 405).

“What I would most desire would be the separation of the white and black races” (CW, Vol. II, p. 521).

“I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races . . . . I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary.” (CW, Vol. III, p. 16).

“I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races . . . . I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people . . .” (CW, Vol, III, pp. 145-146).

“I will to the very last stand by the law of this state, which forbids the marrying of white people with negroes.” (CW, Vol. III, p. 146).

“Senator Douglas remarked . . that . . . this government was made for the white people and not for negroes. Why, in point of mere fact, I think so too.” (CW, Vol. II, p. 281).

Until His Dying Day, Lincoln Plotted to Deport all the Black People Out of America

“I have said that the separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation . . . . Such separation . . . must be effected by colonization” [to Liberia, Central America, anywhere]. (CW, Vol. II, p. 409).

“Let us be brought to believe it is morally right , and . . . favorable to . . . our interest, to transfer the African to his native clime . . .” (CW, Vol. II, p. 409).

“The place I am thinking about having for a colony [for the deportation of all American blacks] is in Central America. It is nearer to us than Liberia.” (CW, Vol. V, pp. 373, 374).

LINCOLN ONLY RHETORICALLY OPPOSED SOUTHERN SLAVERY. IN PRACTICE, HE STRENGTHENED IT

” I think no wise man has perceived, how it [slavery] could be at once eradicated, without producing a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty himself.” (CW, Vol. II, p. 130).

“I meant not to ask for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.” (CW, Vol., II, p. 260).

“I believe there is no right, and ought to be no inclination I the people of the free states to enter into the slave states and interfere with the question of slavery at all.” (CW, Vol. II, p. 492).

“I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.” (CW, Vol. III, p. 16).

“I say that we must not interfere with the institution of slavery . . . because the constitution forbids it, and the general welfare does not require us to do so.” (CW, Vol. III, p. 460).

LINCOLN CHAMPIONED THE FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT

“I do not now, nor ever did, stand in favor of the unconditional repeal of the fugitive slave law.” (CW, Vol., III., p. 40).

“[T]he people of the Southern states are entitled to a Congressional Fugitive Slave Law.” (CW, Vol. III, p. 41).

Lincoln Advocated Secession When it Could Advance His Political Career

“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.” (CW, Vol. 1, p. 438).

LINCOLN VIEWED FORT SUMTER AS AN IMPORTANT TAX COLLECTION POINT AND WENT TO WAR OVER IT

“I think we should hold the forts, or retake them, as the case may be, and collect the revenue.” (CW, Vol. IV, p. 164).

LINCOLN BELIEVED THE CONSTITUTION WAS WHATEVER HE ALONE SAID IT WAS

“The dogmas of the quite past [referring to the U.S. Constitution], are inadequate to the stormy present . . . so we must think anew and act anew.” (CW, Vol. V, p. 537).

“The resolutions quote from the constitution, the definition of treason; and also the . . . safeguards and guarantees therein provided for the citizen . . . against the pretensions of arbitrary power . . . . But these provisions of the constitution have no application to the case we have in hand.” (CW, Vol. VI, p. 262.

“[T]he theory of the general government being only an agency, whose principles are the states [i.e. the true history of the American founding] was new to me and, as I think, is one of the best arguments for the national supremacy.” (CW, Vol. VII, p. 24.

“I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful . . .” (CW, Vol. VII, p. 281).

“You [General John Dix] are therefore hereby commanded forth with to arrest and imprison in any fort or military prison in your command the editors, proprietors and publishers of the aforesaid newspapers [New York World and New York Journal of Commerce].” CW, Vol. VII, p. 348.

“It was decided [by Lincoln alone] that we have a case of rebellion, and that the public safety does require the qualified suspension of the writ [of Habeas Corpus].” CW, Vol. IV, pp. 430-431.

LINCOLN WAS ECONOMICALLY IGNORANT OF THE BIG ECONOMIC ISSUE OF HIS DAY: PROTECTIONIST TARIFFS

“[A] tariff of duties on imported goods . . . is indispensably necessary to the prosperity of the American people.” (CW, Vol. I, p. 307.

“[B]y the tariff system . . . the man who contents himself to live upon the products of his own country , pays nothing at all.” (CW, Vol. I, p. 311).

“All carrying . . . of articles from the place of their production to a distant place for their consumption . . . is useless labor.” (CW, Vol. I, p. 409).

“I was an old Henry Clay tariff whig. In old times I made more speeches on that subject, than on any other. I have not changed my views.” (CW, Vol, III, p. 487).

“The tariff is to the government what a meal is to a family . . .” (CW, Vol., IV, p. 211).

“I must confess that I do not understand the subject [the economics of tariffs].” (CW, Vol. IV, p. 211).

“The power confided to me, will be used . . . to collect the duties and imposes; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion . . .” (CW, Vol. IV, p. 266).

“Accumulations of the public revenue, lying within [Fort Sumter] had been seized [and denied to the U.S. government] . . . . [The administration] sought only to hold the public places and property [i.e., the forts] . . . to collect the revenue.” (CW, Vol. IV, pp. 422-423).

ALTHOUGH HE NEVER BECAME A CHRISTIAN, LINCOLN CLAIMED TO KNOW WHAT WAS IN THE MIND OF GOD AND BLAMED THE WAR ON HIM, ABSOLVING HIMSELF OF ALL RESPONSIBILITY FOR IT, IN ORDER TO BAMBOOZLE THE RELIGIOUS POPULATION OF THE NORTH

“[I]t is peculiarly fit for us to recognize the hand of God in this terrible visitation [i.e. the war].” CW, Vol. IV, p. 482.

“You all may recollect that in taking up the sword thus forced into my hands this Government . . . placed its whole dependence upon the favor of God.” (CW, Vol. V., p. 212).

“God wills this contest [the war].” CW, Vol. V, p. 404.

“If I had my way, this war would never have been commenced . . . but . . . we must believe that He permits it for some wise purpose of his own, mysterious and unknown to us . . .” (CW, Vol. V, p. 478).

“[I]t has not pleased the Almighty to bless us with a return to peace . . .” (CW, Vol. V, p. 518).

“[R]ender the homage due to the Divine Majesty . . . to lead the whole nation, through the paths of repentance and submission to the Divine Will, back to the perfect enjoyment of Union . . .” (CW, Vol. VI, p. 332).

“It has pleased Almighty God . . . to vouchsafe to the army and the navy of the United States victories on land and sea.” (CW, Vol. VI, p. 332).

“I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me . . . . God alone can claim it.” (CW, Vol. VII, p. 282).

“He intends some great good to follow this mighty convulsion, which no mortal could make . . .” (CW, Vol. VII, p. 535).

Joseph Fallon concludes that “Lincoln was not America’s Messiah. He was America’s Lenin, complete with a party dictatorship, centralized economy, and total war.” These are undeniable historical facts. His own words reveal him to be “a demagogue not a democrat, an opportunist not an idealist, and enemy and not a champion of civil rights.” This of course is why he has been so deified by totalitarian-minded politicians of all parties, from Thaddeus Stevens to Barack Obama.

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All throughout his new book, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, David A. Stockman is critical of the Chicago School, especially its intellectual leader during the last half of the twentieth century, Milton Friedman. He captures the irony of the so-called free-market Chicago School on the very first page of his introduction, where he writes of the “capture of the state, especially its central bank, the Federal Reserve, by crony capitalist forces deeply inimical to free markets and democracy.”

This is a deep irony because it was Chicago School economists such as George Stigler who wrote of the “capture theory of regulation” when it came to the trucking industry, the airline industry, and many others. That is, they produced dozens of scholarly articles demonstrating how government regulatory agencies ostensibly created to regulate industry “in the public interest” are most often “captured” by the industry itself and then used not to protect the public but to enforce cartel pricing arrangements.

This was all good, solid, applied free-market economics, but at the same time the Chicago Schoolers ignored the biggest and most important regulatory capture of all – the creation of the Fed. The Chicago School simply ignored the obvious fact that the Fed was created as a governmental cartel enforcement mechanism for the banking industry – during an era when many other kinds of regulatory institutions were being created for the same purpose (i.e., “natural monopoly” regulation).

Not only did the Chicago School ignore this glaring omission from its “capture theory” tradition of research on regulation; it also ignored the realistic, economic analysis of political decision making that was an important part of the research of the two most famous Chicago School Nobel laureates next to Friedman – George Stigler and Gary Becker. Stigler and Becker published some important articles in the field that is better known as public choice, or the economics of political decision making. Friedman himself had long been an advisor to Republican politicians, so no one could credibly argue that Chicago School economists were naïve about the realities of politics.

However, if Friedmanite monetarism was anything, it was naïve about political reality. The fatal flaw of Friedman’s famous “monetary rule” of constant growth of the money supply in the 3-4 percent range was premised on the assumption that a machine-like Fed chairman would selflessly pursue the public interest by enforcing Friedman’s monetary rule. According to Friedman, Stockman writes, “inflation would be rapidly extinguished if money supply was harnessed to a fixed and unwavering rate of growth, such as 3 percent per annum.” This was the fundamental assumption behind monetarism, and it flew in the face of everything the Chicago Schoolers purported to know about political reality. In other words, Friedmanite monetarism was never a realistic possibility, for as Friedman himself frequently said of all other governmental institutions besides the Fed, a government institution that is not political is as likely as a cat that barks like a dog. Friedman’s monetary rule, Stockman concludes, was “basically academic poppycock.” He mocks the idea of a “monetary rule” as the “idea that the FOMC [Federal Reserve Open Market Committee] would function as faithful monetary eunuchs, keeping their eyes on the M1 gauge and deftly adjusting the dial in either direction upon any deviation from the 3 percent target.” This was “sheer fantasy,” says Stockman, and an extreme example of “political naivete.”

Stockman also takes Friedman and the Chicago School to task by writing that “Friedman thoroughly misunderstood the Great Depression and concluded erroneously that undue regard for the gold standard rules by the Fed during 1929-1933 had resulted in its failure to conduct aggressive open market purchases of government debt.” Stockman debunks the notion that the Fed failed to pump enough liquidity into the banking system by merely noting that “there was no liquidity shortage” during that period and “commercial banks were not constrained at all in their ability to make loans or generate demand deposits (M1). “Friedman thus sided with the central planners,” writes Stockman, in “contending that the … thousands of banks that already had excess reserves should have been doused with more and still more reserves, until they started lending and creating deposits in accordance with the dictates of the monetarist gospel.” As a matter of historical fact, Stockman points out, “excess reserves in the banking system grew dramatically during the forty-five month period, implying just the opposite of monetary stringency” (i.e., Friedman’s main argument). Thus, “there is simply no case that monetary stringency caused the Great Depression.”

The current Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, based his academic career on the false Friedmanite theory of the Great Depression, Stockman writes. Bernanke’s “sole contribution to this truly wrong-headed proposition was a few essays consisting mainly of dense math equations. They showed the undeniable correlation between the collapse of GDP and money supply, but proved no causation whatsoever.” Thus, the old saying about “how to lie with statistics” was matched by “how to mislead with mathematical models.”

Stockman makes the case that the Austrian business cycle theory is a far more reliable source of understanding about the Great Depression. “[T]he great contraction of 1929-1933 was rooted in the bubble of debt and financial speculation that built up in the years before 1929,” he writes, and “not from mistakes made by the Fed after the bubble collapsed.” Friedman’s monetary theory, in other words, was not based on “positive economics” or historical reality, but was assumed to be “an a priori truth” merely because it was the “great” Milton Friedman who authored it. In any event, Friedman’s entire theory of the Great Depression has been “demolished” by his intellectual disciple, Ben Bernanke, who increased the excess reserves of the U.S. banking system from $40 billion to $1.7 trillion as of 2012 with little or no recognizable effect on the real economy.

Perhaps Friedman’s biggest sin, according to Stockman, was being the “brains” behind Richard Nixon’s executive order in 1971 that removed gold standard restraints on monetary printing. Friedman therefore assisted in the institutionalization of “a regime which allowed politicians to chronically spend without taxing,” he writes. Ironically, “the nation’s most famous modern conservative economist became the father of Big Government, chronic deficits, and national fiscal bankruptcy.” “For all practical purposes … it was Friedman who shifted the foundation of the nation’s money supply from gold to T-bills.”

Stockman describes Friedman’s political naivete as mind boggling. “Friedman never even entertained the possibility that once the central bank was freed from the stern discipline of protecting its gold reserves, it would fall into the hands of monetary activists and central planners” and that the Fed would “become a fount of rationalizations for incessant tinkering and intervention in financial markets.” Printing dollars with reckless abandon, the Fed fueled commodity booms in the 1970s, followed by busts and crashes, and then did the same with stock and real estate markets in the succeeding decades.

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On this Memorial Day it is appropriate to memorialize a number of long-dead American institutions (RIP). The first would be the main principles of the Declaration of Independence, beginning with the notion that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. The Lincoln administration destroyed that principle long ago when it responded to the withdrawal of consent by eleven Southern states by waging total war on their civilian populations for four long years, killing as many as 400,000 Southerners according to the latest research, while bombing, burning, and looting Southern cities and towns.

The Declaration of Independence also declared in its closing paragraphs that the states were “free and independent” of any other government. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! At the time, “free and independent states” meant that Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, etc. were considered to be free and independent states in the same sense that Great Britain, France and Spain were free and independent states.

Treason in the U.S. Constitution is defined as “only” levying war upon the states, or giving aid and comfort to THEIR enemies. This of course is exactly what the Lincoln regime did, while redefining treason to mean exactly the opposite of what it means in the Constitution: opposition to the federal government.

The notion of “limited constitutional government” is also long dead, thanks to the victorious Hamiltonian nationalists in American politics. It was Hamilton himself who invented the notion of “implied powers” of the Constitution almost before the ink was dry on the original document. In Hamiltonian language, “implied” means “unlimited.” Jefferson believed that the Constitution could “bind” the government in “chains.” His nemesis Hamilton was of the opposite opinion that the Constitution could be used to rubber stamp anything and everything the central government ever wanted to do as long as it was “properly” interpreted by slick, conniving lawyers like himself (or by fellow nationalists like John Marshall or Abraham Lincoln). Hamilton’s view has prevailed, as was proven for the millionth time by Chief Justice John Roberts when he declared the Obamacare mandate to be a “tax” and therefore constitutional despite the fact that Obamacare’s proponents argued before the Supreme Court that the mandate was NOT a tax.

Also dead is the notion that there is such a thing as personal liberty – at least in the eyes of the federal government. The government now claims to have a “right” to spy on every citizen without a search warrant, to monitor the mails, bank accounts and emails, to grope and sexually assault each and every citizen passing through an airport, and even to murder American citizens with drones, on American soil, in the name of “security.”

What’s left of America’s market economy is controlled, regulated, regimented, and suffocated by more than two hundred years of accumulated government bureaucracy. American businesses are regulated by more than 80,000 pages of fine print regulations in The Federal Register; by dozens of federal regulatory agencies whose agents often carry firearms to enforce their edicts against the citizens; and by hundreds of other state and local government regulatory bureaucracies that attempt to regulate and tax all aspects of business life. There are even local government taxes on the air above “public” sidewalks if occupied by a commercial enterprise. It is all a part of government’s relentless, never-ending war on capitalism and freedom.

Almost twenty-five years after the worldwide collapse of socialism the American regime has embraced socialist central planning with tremendous zeal. The primary vehicle for the American version of Soviet central planning is the Federal Reserve Board, which claims “authority” to control, regulate, and regiment all aspects of financial markets. It is devoted to destroying market interest rates, which are a necessary ingredient for real capitalism to exist, and believes in the “fatal conceit” of a centrally-planned economy. Its head, the bearded Ben Bernanke, even looks a lot like Lenin.

Also gone are the days when American politicians would be praised with words like “he kept us out of war” or took seriously Thomas Jefferson’s warnings about “entangling alliances” with foreign countries. The new foreign policy mantra is: “Do As We Say, Or We Will Invade and Occupy Your Country and Murder Your Citizens by the Hundreds of Thousands.” “Soldiers” are not defenders of American freedom but paid murderers for the state. Endless military intervention all around the world has made life more dangerous and more insecure for Americans by creating endless enemies who resent it when other countries invade, bomb, and destroy their homelands. Nothing has been more destructive of American freedom than the state itself and its military-industrial-congressional complex. War is the health of the state, and an expanded state is always and everywhere the enemy of personal freedom.

Governments at all levels have been very busy for a very long time destroying American freedom and prosperity. A single day could never be long enough to memorialize all of our lost freedoms, but I guess one has to start somewhere.

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The Nobel prize-winning Austrian School economist F.A. Hayek titled his last book The Fatal Conceit to describe the conceit of the notion that socialist central planners could possibly possess all of the detailed knowledge that is in the minds of millions in a market economy to “plan” a socialist economy. His 1974 Nobel prize speech was entitled “The Pretense of Knowledge” and conveyed the same message. Despite the fact that the whole world learned of just how right Hayek, Mises, and the Austrians were for so many decades about socialism upon its worldwide collapse in the late 1980s, America’s central planners keep marching ahead with more and more failed central plans that are based on pretentious fantasies dressed up with unintelligible mathematical economic models – just like the Soviet central planners of the twentieth century.

I speak of course of the Federal Reserve Board and its economic central planners. A caricature of this socialistic central planning mentality was recently on display in the 2012 Annual Report of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. The entire 40-page publication is devoted to not one but two interviews with the Minneapolis Fed’s president, one Narayana R. Kocherlakota, who had one of his employees (Doug Clement) throw him a series of softball pitch-style questions.

What one first learns by the interviews is that Fed bureaucrats ignore the age-old economic wisdom about the folly of government-imposed price controls. In this case the price being controlled is various interest rates. Kocherlakota talks of an economic “liftoff plan” that is “to sustain low interest rates; that is, we’ll keep the fed funds rate extraordinarily low at least until unemployment falls below 5½ percent . . .” The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC), he says, “will keep interest rates low until, say, mid-2016.”

The Fed’s “quantitative easing,” which used to be called “inflationary monetary policy,” is hailed as a tremendous success by Kocherlakota, citing a speech by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke as “an excellent assessment of the effectiveness of quantitative easing.” This of course is sheer fantasy and butt kissing of the first order by Kocherlakota.

The Fed’s zero interest rate policy is a war on savings, which is to say a war on economic investment, productivity, and economic growth. Savings and capital accumulation must fuel business investment in order for economic growth to occur. Free-market interest rates allow individuals to determine for themselves, based on their rates of time preference (whether to spend more or save more in the present) how much to save and how much to spend. The Fed’s central planners are hell bent on destroying all incentives to save because they are all Keynesian ideologues who believe in the Keynesian superstition that it is possible to consume without first working and producing income with which to purchase goods and services. “[Q]uantitative easing has the impact of pushing down on longer-term interest rates,” says Kocherlakota, “And that should be directly stimulative of the economy because by pushing down on market interest rates, people are led to think, ‘Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t be buying those assets that are paying such a low yield. I should spend money instead.’” Of course it has NOT been “directly stimulative” of the economy. Anything but.

So Fed bureaucrats: 1) deny that the Greenspan Fed had anything to do with the housing bubble and its bursting, despite years of pursuing the goal of near-zero mortgage interest rates; and 2) claim that five years of the exact same policies have succeeded when it is apparent to the entire world that they have not.

Kocherlakota’s central planning hubris and pretentiousness get even worse when he inadvertently contradicts himself by saying that there is a need to do more than pursue a zero interest rate policy. (If it’s been such a “success,” why is something more needed?). Specifically, he states that “[W]e’d like to push it [interest rates] down further and can’t.” That, however, “should be a signal to the fiscal authority to be more interventionist in the economy . . . ”

Translation: Quantitative easing has failed, so the congress and the president (a.k.a. “the fiscal authority”) need to experiment with even more central planning schemes. The particular central planning scheme proposed by Kocherlakota is “raising futureconsumption taxes” (emphasis added) which he speculates will “make future spending more costly and thereby encourage current spending.” More failed Keynesian central planning, in other words. The assumption here is that there is no need to save, invest, work, and produce; we just need to spend, spend, spend like a nation of spoiled little rich kids. One thing all of these Fed central planning schemes have in common is that they always call for more money printing, more government spending, more taxation, and more intervention of all kinds.

Kocherlakota is absolutely dogmatic about his (and his fellow Fed bureaucrats’) devotion to the imposition of price controls via the manipulation of interest rates. “[W]e’re not going to get in the way of economic recovery by raising [interest] rates,” he declares. No, sir! The Fed will not allow any incentives for savings and investment; kiss your retirement savings goodbye. “Price controls forever!” is apparently the third Fed “mandate” along with the preposterous and ridiculous claims that it is charged with controlling both inflation and unemployment (the “dual mandate” in Washingtonese). Just in case the reader missed his repeated statements about keeping interest rates as close to zero as possible, thereby destroying the capital-reallocation processes of the free market, there is a blue page at the end of the two interviews that declares, in all capital letters, that: “THIS POLICY IS ABOUT LETTING THE PUBLIC KNOW WE’RE NOT GOING TO GET IN THE WAY OF RECOVERY BY RAISING RATES UNTIL RECOVERY IS CLOSE TO COMPLETE.” Never, in other words, because government bureaucrats never, ever, admit that their job is done and they can go home.

The academic economics profession almost entirely abandoned Keynesianism during the 1970s when it failed to have a coherent explanation for stagflation – the simultaneous increase of inflation and unemployment. Even old Keynesian lions like Franco Modigliani of MIT publicly admitted that Keynesian “stabilization policy” had failed. The fundamental reason for rejecting Keynesianism became even stronger during the 1980s when inflation and unemployment fell simultaneously for the entire decade. These events proved once and for all the folly of the “Phillips Curve” as the essential tool of Keyensian central planning – the idea that lower unemployment can be “purchased” by central planners by creating more inflation through money printing.

All of this is ingored by today’s Fed bureaucrats like Kocherlakota and Bernanke who still follow the Keynesian central planning guidelines from the 1948 edition of Paul Samuelson’s principles of (Keyensian and interventionist) economics textbook. The Phillips Curve superstition is repeated throughout Kocherlakota’s interviews. “By providing more monetary stimulus, the FOMC can facilitate a faster transition of unemployment to its long-run lower level,” he says. “Having a balanced approach to the two mandates [i.e., lower unemployement and inflation] means that you should be willing to allow inflation to be above its 2 percent target in order to facilitate a faster transition of unemployment back to its lower . . . levels.” Keynesianism may have been rejected by serious academic economists, but it will never be rejected by politicians and their court historians because it gives them intellectual cover for never-ending interventionism, which enhances their own power, perks, incomes, and prestige.

Endless Triviality

Like all government bureaucrats, Kocherlakota can go on and on forever about absolutely trivial, unimportant, and unrealistic matters. He devotes a good bit of his interview to patting himself on the back for taking the “daring” stand of suggesting that Ben Bernanke’s “target” of 2 percent inflation /year might be revised to say, 2¼ percent. Oooooooooooh. “We could say 3 percent, but I don’t think we’d get to 3 percent. So, I think 2¼ percent is allowing as much leeway as we really need,” he babbles.

Such babbling suggests that Fed bureaucrats like Kocherlakota believe that “setting” the annual inflation rate is as easy as setting the thermostat in one’s home. This of course is gross nonsense, as history has proven over and over again. And by the way, Bernanke’s goal of “only” 2 percent inflation per year forever, if achieved, would reduce the purchasing power of the dollar by about 50 percent during the career of the average American worker. Some “target.”

Club Fed

Fed bureaucrats and their academic accomplices think of themselves as a closed club of central planners who can do no wrong and make no mistakes. For example, Kocherlakota boasts of the Fed conferences he has attended in places like Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and of all the wisdom he gleaned there from fellow Fed functionaries. He singles out the economist Edward Lazear, for example, the former Bush economic advisor who advised that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would actually be good for the U.S. economy by providing a Keyensian “stimulus.” This false notion is an example of the famous “broken window fallacy” of Bastiat and Hazlitt. Spending money on war does not “stimulate” the economy; it merely diverts resources from the productive, private sector of the economy to the task of mass murder and the destruction of civilizations in foreign countries. Calling war an economic stimulus is one of the worst examples of “free-lunch economics” that every freshman economic student should be aware of.

It was also Edward Lazear, writes David Stockman in The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America(p. 557), who “had insisted in May 2008 that ‘the data are pretty clear that we are not in a recession.’” When the “Wall Street meltdown” did occur, writes Stockman, “Lazear did not have the foggiest notion of why it happened.”

Kocherlakota is himself just as clueless about many of the subjects he pontificates about in his interviews. He bemoans unemployment caused by “job mismatch” but is silent on the fact that the most colossal example of the creation of job mismatch was the Fed-generated housing bubble that seduced millions of Americans into employment in housing and housing-related industries in the early 2000s, and then losing their jobs, careers, homes, and savings when the bubble burst. This was the mother of all mismatch unemployment crises, caused by the Fed-generated boom-and-bust cycle. All Kocherlakota can say about it is that “it would take a lot bigger increase in inflation to generate a desired fall in unemployment.”

The Fed bureaucracy failed utterly to forecast the bursting of the real estate bubble it had created, as the above quotation of Edward Lazear shows. Such gross failures do not deter Fed bureaucrats from continuing to pretend that they are fortune tellers and mystics, however. Kocherlakota announces that the FOMC “expects that we will get to 6½ percent unemployment around mid-2015.” Not 6¼ or 6¾, but 6½. Not not September or October of 2015, but June. What conceit, hubris, and pretentiousness.

The Best of Thomas DiLorenzo at LRC

Thomas DiLorenzo Archives at Mises.org

Rush Limbugh recently threw a fit on his radio show over an appearance by Michael Sheuer on the FOX News Channel (as did Sean Hannity, who was even more apoplectic than Limbaugh). Michael Sheuer is the former CIA head of the bin Laden unit. Limbaugh was at his sarcastic and bombastic name-calling worst in responding to Sheuer’s comments.

What on earth did Michael Sheuer say to cause such an emotional explosion of bombast?, one might ask. Well, when asked by the host of a FOX News show about what might motivate Muslims from the Middle East to harm Americans, the man the CIA put in charge of the “bin Laden unit” said, “People don’t like being invaded or bombed,” and they sometimes retaliate. This of course is perfectly reasonable and understandable. It’s called “blowback.” He reminded the FOX host that Muslims have long protested the American military presence in the Muslim country of Saudi Arabia; the invasion and occupation of Iraq; the killing of thousands of Iraqi civilians; the statement by U.N. Ambasador Albright that a half million dead Iraqi children was “a price we are willing to pay” to achieve our political objectives; the U.S. government’s support for the government of Israel in its wars against Muslims; and the bombing and killing of civilians in numerous other Muslim countries, most recently in Mali and Libya under the Obama regime.

“We are trying to impose democracy . . . and parliamentary government . .. on a people who don’t want it,” said Sheuer. All of this is perfectly true, which is why Limbaugh did not spend one second of air time disputing anything that Michael Sheuer actually said. He did not because he could not. Instead, Limbaugh attacked a straw man by reinterpreting Sheuer’s words to supposedly mean that “Islam has nothing to do with it” and “It’s the United States’ fault!!!!!!”

Scheuer never said “Islam has nothing to do with it.” Limbaugh said that. What Sheuer has said is that many Muslims resent the never-ending attempts by the U.S. government to impose our culture of “democracy” on them at gunpoint and at the cost of thousands of Muslim lives. Limbaugh was never a CIA agent like Scheuer, but one might think of him alternatively as an FIB agent of the state.

Limbaugh was even more misleading when he screeched and whined over and over that Scheuer supposedly said that “It’s the United States’ fault!” “It’s America’s fault!” No, Rush, it’s not “America’s” fault. It is the fault of the several dozen or so political connivers, liars, manipulators and empire builders who call themselves “statesmen.” The average American never has anything whatsoever to do with the “diplomacy” that gets us into never-ending, perpetual wars for perpetual peace. As Randolph Bourne wrote in his famous essay, “War is the Health of the State,” [A]ll foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are . . . the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.”

It is not “America” that is responsible for the killing of hundreds or thousands of Muslim civilians with drone strikes or other weapons of mass destruction. War always originates, wrote Bourne, when “the government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war” (emphasis added). Contrary to what Limbaugh insinuates and what Barack Obama has similarly declared, the government is not us. The government is the government; it is the largest instrument of organized plunder ever known to man. We are the plundered, duped, and misled into catastrophic, bankrupting war after war that has nothing to do with “national defense.”

What really set Limbaugh off was Michael Scheuer’s mockery of the standard neocon line that “they hate us because of our freedoms.” Muslims are not motivated to harm Americans because “you and I can have a beer after work,” Sheuer said to the FOX host. He called this theory “insane,” and he was right.

Those who really hate our freedoms are those who supported the PATRIOT Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, warrantless wiretapping, internet eavesdropping, and the creation of what William F. Buckley approvingly described as a “totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores” with a gigantic FBI and CIA complex, a massive military, and the militarization of society into a police state. (Buckley – Limbaugh’s hero of heroes – once said that all of that was necessary in his day to fight the Cold War). Rush Limbaugh would be at the top of the list of supporters of such a freedom-destroying regime.

Randolph Bourne would be even more cynical about war had he lived to witness the gargantuan army of squawking chickenhawks on TV and talk radio, led by the likes of Limbaugh and Hannity, whose cheerleading for war is many orders of magnitude greater that that produced by the chickenhawk journalists of Bourne’s day (the World War I era). The role of today’s squawking chickenhawks is to serve as the propaganda megaphones of the warfare state and the military-industrial complex. In return, they are paid eye-popping salaries for their mediocre talents and turned into “celebrities” of a sort. Their job is to make sure that the nightmarish reality of the warfare state as described by Randolph
Bourne becomes or remains a reality. With the onset of war, said Bourne, “the patriot loses all sense of the distinction between state, nation, and government” and “the individual becomes almost identical with his society.” This of course is what the Limbaughs of the world want when they falsely accuse people like Michael Sheuer of saying “America” is at fault for terrorist attacks.

With war, “minority opinion” becomes “a case for outlawry,” and at times “the minorities are either intimidated into silence, or brought around slowly by a subtle process of persuasion . . . ” That again is the job of the squawking chickenhawks. They are in reality a part of “the whole terrific force of the state” which is “brought to bear against heretics,” a.k.a., the proponents of peace and prosperity as opposed to war and impoverishment of the masses.

As soon as Barack Obama took office Limbaugh, Hannity, Levin, and the rest of the squawking chickenhawks totally reversed their personas. During the Bush regime they sounded like Benito Mussolini in their denunciations of the Constitution in the name of “safety.” “9/11 changed everything” was their mantra. Translation: To hell with the Constitution. Liberty Schmiberty. But with a Democrat in office they began sounding more like Thomas Jefferson, even writing books about liberty and freedom for a change. But their true personalities are revealed whenever a genuine Jeffersonian like Ron Paul, or a genuine advocate of American peace and prosperity like Michael Sheuer becomes prominent. In such instances the claws come out, the microphones are turned up, and they reveal their true selves as the propaganda mouthpieces for the state, which Randolph Bourne described as representing “all the autocratic, arbitrary, coercive, belligerent forces within a social group,” a “sort of complexus of everything most distasteful to the modern creative free spirit, the feeling for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. War is the health of the State.”

In the April 8 issue of the Wall Street Journal George Schultz and Gary Becker advocated a massive new carbon tax. Their arguments are based on very poor economic reasoning and an extremely naïve view of politics and politicians.

Schultz and Becker argue for a “revenue-neutral” tax on all forms of energy that burn carbon. “Revenue neutrality” is Washington-speak for the notion that a change in tax policy should neither increase nor decrease total tax revenue collected by government. It is a pure fantasy, in other words. No central planners in world history have ever been so brilliant and so omniscient as to be able to restructure a major portion of the tax system in a country of more than 300 million people in a way that produces exactly the same revenue next year as this year. In reality, “revenue neutrality” is always just a smokescreen for “tax increase.” Politicians will always “err” on the side of raising taxes despite all their diversionary lingo.

In advocating heavy new taxes on energy Schultz and Becker completely ignore the fact that there are already myriad taxes of all kinds, along with the implicit tax of regulation, on all aspects of energy production and distribution. There are excise taxes, corporation income taxes, payroll taxes, and the regulatory prohibitions on drilling for oil in the outer-continental shelf and in much of Alaska where there are known to be massive oil reserves. One can just as easily make the case that the energy industry is over-taxed as under-taxed, as Schultz and Becker do.

They do make one good recommendation – elimination of “subsidies” to energy producers, but they fail to mention even one example of such subsidies to illustrate their point. One would hope that they do not refer to tax deductions or “loopholes” as “subsidies.” To do so is to assume that government owns all of our income and is “subsiidizing” us whenever it does not tax all of it.

Schultz and Becker advocate the worst possible form of tax collection – hiding their new energy tax from the public by imposing it “at the level of production,” which they call “administratively more efficient” than imposing the tax at the point of consumption. Hiding the tax in this way will fuel anti-capitalistic bias even more since the average citizen faced with a higher energy bill will naturally blame the greedy energy companies instead of the tax-hungry government. Worse yet, such a tax would be regressive, imposing a disproportionate burden on lower-income citizens.

It gets worse. Shultz and Becker also advocate an expansion of the welfare state by paying people on welfare even more than they are paid now for not working by distributing the proceeds of their carbon tax as part of the ludicrously mis-named “Earned Income Tax Credit.” Government can play Santa Claus by sending out such checks to welfare recipients and calling the checks “your carbon dividend,” say Schultz and Becker.

And it gets even worse. The rate of the new carbon tax should keep increasing forever, “approximately at the real interest rate,” they say. They claim that this would be only fair by plundering future generations at a similar rate of plunder being imposed on the current generation (although they do not, of course, use the perfectly accurate word “plunder” in their article).

If there is revenue left over after subsidizing welfare parasites with “carbon dividends,” Shultz and Becker believe that government should further politicize research and development with “sustained support for research and development in the energy area.”

George Schultz and Gary Becker are old lions of the Chicago School of economics. It is mystifying how that school of thought ever became associated with “free market” economics.

Recently by Thomas DiLorenzo: Allen Guelzo Misinforms the World Socialist Movement About Lincoln

In the April 8 issue of the Wall Street Journal George Schultz and Gary Becker advocated a massive new carbon tax. Their arguments are based on very poor economic reasoning and an extremely naïve view of politics and politicians.

Schultz and Becker argue for a "revenue-neutral" tax on all forms of energy that burn carbon. "Revenue neutrality" is Washington-speak for the notion that a change in tax policy should neither increase nor decrease total tax revenue collected by government. It is a pure fantasy, in other words. No central planners in world history have ever been so brilliant and so omniscient as to be able to restructure a major portion of the tax system in a country of more than 300 million people in a way that produces exactly the same revenue next year as this year. In reality, "revenue neutrality" is always just a smokescreen for "tax increase." Politicians will always "err" on the side of raising taxes despite all their diversionary lingo.

In advocating heavy new taxes on energy Schultz and Becker completely ignore the fact that there are already myriad taxes of all kinds, along with the implicit tax of regulation, on all aspects of energy production and distribution. There are excise taxes, corporation income taxes, payroll taxes, and the regulatory prohibitions on drilling for oil in the outer-continental shelf and in much of Alaska where there are known to be massive oil reserves. One can just as easily make the case that the energy industry is over-taxed as under-taxed, as Schultz and Becker do.

They do make one good recommendation — elimination of "subsidies" to energy producers, but they fail to mention even one example of such subsidies to illustrate their point. One would hope that they do not refer to tax deductions or "loopholes" as "subsidies." To do so is to assume that government owns all of our income and is "subsidizing" us whenever it does not tax all of it.

Schultz and Becker advocate the worst possible form of tax collection — hiding their new energy tax from the public by imposing it "at the level of production," which they call "administratively more efficient" than imposing the tax at the point of consumption. Hiding the tax in this way will fuel anti-capitalistic bias even more since the average citizen faced with a higher energy bill will naturally blame the greedy energy companies instead of the tax-hungry government. Worse yet, such a tax would be regressive, imposing a disproportionate burden on lower-income citizens.

It gets worse. Shultz and Becker also advocate an expansion of the welfare state by paying people on welfare even more than they are paid now for not working by distributing the proceeds of their carbon tax as part of the ludicrously mis-named "Earned Income Tax Credit." Government can play Santa Claus by sending out such checks to welfare recipients and calling the checks "your carbon dividend," say Schultz and Becker.

And it gets even worse. The rate of the new carbon tax should keep increasing forever, "approximately at the real interest rate," they say. They claim that this would be only fair by plundering future generations at a similar rate of plunder being imposed on the current generation (although they do not, of course, use the perfectly accurate word "plunder" in their article).

If there is revenue left over after subsidizing welfare parasites with "carbon dividends," Shultz and Becker believe that government should further politicize research and development with "sustained support for research and development in the energy area."

George Schultz and Gary Becker are old lions of the Chicago School of economics. It is mystifying how that school of thought ever became associated with "free market" economics.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You're Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe, How Capitalism Saved America, and Hamilton's Curse: How Jefferson's Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution — And What It Means for America Today. His latest book is Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government.

The Best of Thomas DiLorenzo at LRC

Thomas DiLorenzo Archives at Mises.org

A philosophy professor named Allen Guelzo discovered in 1995 that one way out of academic obscurity (where most philosophy professors reside) is to become a “Lincoln scholar.” He began writing books that tell the same old, same old, line about Lincoln: he died on Good Friday; he supposedly died for the sins of America just as Jesus died for the sins of the world; etc., etc. His first book of this time is entitled Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President. Seeking redemption for your sins? Then become a Lincoln worshipper, says Allen Guelzo.

Guelzo now teaches at Gettysburg College. He was recently interviewed by the World Socialist Web Site which describes itself as an arm of the “International Committee of the Fourth International” and “the leadership of the world socialist movement” that is “guided by a Marxist world outlook.” The interview is entirely friendly with every question a “softball pitch.” One striking feature of the interview is how Guelzo’s comments on Lincoln and economics are exactly the opposite of historical reality.

One of Guelzo’s first comments on Lincoln’s economic policies is based on a fake Lincoln quote about which Guelzo is apparently unaware. The Marxist Web site asked, “did [Lincoln] not privilege labor [over capital]“? Guelzo’s response is “He does indeed talk about labor having priority over capital . . .” Part of the Lincoln mythology is that Abe supposedly said: “All that loves labor serves the nation. All that harms labor is treason to America . . . . If any man tells you he loves America, yet hates labor, he is a liar.” In their book, They Never Said it: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions (Oxford University Press, 1989), Paul Boller and John George concluded that “there is no record of [Lincoln’s] ever having uttered these words.”

The biggest howler of the interview is where Guelzo claims than an un-named “observer” supposedly said that “on political economy [Lincoln] was great, that there was no one better than Lincoln.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Lincoln was a Hamiltonian, which is to say he was a mercantilist. He was slavishly devoted to the Whig policy of economic nationalism as expressed by the “American System” of Hamilton and Clay. This “system” was comprised of protectionist tariffs for the benefit of mostly Northern manufacturers; corporate welfare for road and canal-building and railroad corporations; and a national bank to finance subsidies and bailouts and to ladle out cheap credit to politically-connected businesses.

“Few people in the Whig Party were so committed to its economic agenda as Lincoln,” wrote Michael Holt in The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party. “From the moment Lincoln first entered political life as a candidate for the state legislature he demonstrated an unswerving fidelity to Henry Clay and to Clay’s American system,” wrote Robert Johannsen in Lincoln, the South, and Slavery. Lincoln himself once said that all of his economic ideas came from Henry Clay.

In his book Lincoln the Man Edgar Lee Masters gave a perfect description of the Hamilton/Clay/Lincoln “American System”:

Clay was the champion of that political system which doles favors to the strong in order to win and to keep their adherence to the government. His system offered shelter to devious schemes and corrupt enterprises . . . . He was the beloved son of Alexander Hamilton with his corrupt funding schemes, his superstitions concerning the advantage of a public debt, and a people taxed to make profits for enterprises that cannot stand alone. His example and his doctrines led to the creation of a party that had no platform to announce, because its principles were plunder and nothing else.

This was neo-mercantilism, the very system that genuine “greats” in the field of political economy, such as Adam Smith, have always condemned, contrary to Allen Guelzo’s silly and uninformed opinion. Lincoln’s ruminations on political economy ranged from wrongheaded to ludicrous. He claimed that protectionist tariffs would cause lower prices, the exact opposite of the truth; he advocated autarky, or the complete prohibition of all imports of anything that could be grown or produced in the U.S., thereby depriving consumers of the benefits of international competition and the division of labor; and he compared the sound-money critics of a central bank run by politicians to Judas in one of his zanier speeches.

Guelzo informs the World Socialist Web Site that Lincoln never had a political thought that did not flow from the Declaration of Independence. What Lincoln actually said, however, is that all of his political thoughts flowed from the politics of Henry Clay, not the Declaration of Independence. He once said that his career aspiration was to be “the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois.” DeWitt Clinton was the early nineteenth-century governor of New York who perfected the spoils system during the building of the Erie Canal.

Guelzo also repeats the mantra of Lincoln’s supposedly great “love” for the Declaration of Independence. But the Declaration of Independence was a declaration of secession from the British empire. In it the states are described as “free and independent” in the same sense that Great Britain, France, or Spain were “free and independent” states. Lincoln most certainly could not have “loved” the document that proves that America was created by an act of secession, the very principle of the American Revolution.

And of course there is the blather about how Lincoln “did keep the union together.” Of course, in reality Lincoln’s war destroyed the voluntary union of the founders and replaced it with a coerced, Soviet-style “union” held together literally at gunpoint. Had he not done this, says Guelzo, “This would take the United States off the table as a major world player, and then what would you do with the history of the 20^th century?”

Let me take a crack at answering this question. Without U.S. entry into World War I, financed in part by the new national bank of the sort that Lincoln longed for his entire adult life, the European powers would have eventually settled their disputes, as they always had done in the past. There would have been no Versailles Treaty that pushed Germany into the hands of Hitler, and the Russian communists would have been much weaker. Consequently, there would not likely have been a World War II and a 45-year long Cold War that followed.

As a decentralized, federal system that had long ago abolished slavery peacefully, as all the rest of the world did in the nineteenth century (including New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, etc.) America would have been a counter-example to all the world compared to the centralized, socialistic bureaucracies that dominated the 20^th century (especially Russia and China and all the other socialist countries).

America may well have not been transformed from a constitutional republic to an empire with military bases in more than 150 countries. Presidents and their propagandists would not have repeated the Lincolnian mantra that “all men everywhere are created equal” to “justify” foreign military intervention in hundreds of places in the name of “spreading democracy and freedom” (but in reality for the purpose of confiscating resources or imposing mercantilism on foreign lands by military force for the benefit of American corporations).

This is not “capitalism” but corporatism or neo-mercantilism. Real capitalism is a system of mutually-advantageous, voluntary trade and does not require imposition at the barrel of a gun. Allen Guelzo is of course oblivious to all of this and relies instead with such silly rhetoric as when he tells the World Socialist Web Site that sleazy, corrupt, politically-connected lawyer/lobbyists like Lincoln were “the shock troops of capitalism.”

Recently by Thomas DiLorenzo: Paul Krugman Proves Himself To Be a Fraud (Again)

A philosophy professor named Allen Guelzo discovered in 1995 that one way out of academic obscurity (where most philosophy professors reside) is to become a "Lincoln scholar." He began writing books that tell the same old, same old, line about Lincoln: he died on Good Friday; he supposedly died for the sins of America just as Jesus died for the sins of the world; etc., etc. His first book of this time is entitled Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President. Seeking redemption for your sins? Then become a Lincoln worshipper, says Allen Guelzo.

Guelzo now teaches at Gettysburg College. He was recently interviewed by the World Socialist Web Site which describes itself as an arm of the "International Committee of the Fourth International" and "the leadership of the world socialist movement" that is "guided by a Marxist world outlook." The interview is entirely friendly with every question a "softball pitch." One striking feature of the interview is how Guelzo's comments on Lincoln and economics are exactly the opposite of historical reality.

One of Guelzo's first comments on Lincoln's economic policies is based on a fake Lincoln quote about which Guelzo is apparently unaware. The Marxist Web site asked, "did [Lincoln] not privilege labor [over capital]"? Guelzo's response is "He does indeed talk about labor having priority over capital . . ." Part of the Lincoln mythology is that Abe supposedly said: "All that loves labor serves the nation. All that harms labor is treason to America . . . . If any man tells you he loves America, yet hates labor, he is a liar." In their book, They Never Said it: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions (Oxford University Press, 1989), Paul Boller and John George concluded that "there is no record of [Lincoln's] ever having uttered these words."

The biggest howler of the interview is where Guelzo claims than an un-named "observer" supposedly said that "on political economy [Lincoln] was great, that there was no one better than Lincoln." Nothing could be further from the truth. Lincoln was a Hamiltonian, which is to say he was a mercantilist. He was slavishly devoted to the Whig policy of economic nationalism as expressed by the "American System" of Hamilton and Clay. This "system" was comprised of protectionist tariffs for the benefit of mostly Northern manufacturers; corporate welfare for road and canal-building and railroad corporations; and a national bank to finance subsidies and bailouts and to ladle out cheap credit to politically-connected businesses.

"Few people in the Whig Party were so committed to its economic agenda as Lincoln," wrote Michael Holt in The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party. "From the moment Lincoln first entered political life as a candidate for the state legislature he demonstrated an unswerving fidelity to Henry Clay and to Clay's American system," wrote Robert Johannsen in Lincoln, the South, and Slavery. Lincoln himself once said that all of his economic ideas came from Henry Clay.

In his book Lincoln the Man Edgar Lee Masters gave a perfect description of the Hamilton/Clay/Lincoln "American System":

Clay was the champion of that political system which doles favors to the strong in order to win and to keep their adherence to the government. His system offered shelter to devious schemes and corrupt enterprises . . . . He was the beloved son of Alexander Hamilton with his corrupt funding schemes, his superstitions concerning the advantage of a public debt, and a people taxed to make profits for enterprises that cannot stand alone. His example and his doctrines led to the creation of a party that had no platform to announce, because its principles were plunder and nothing else.

This was neo-mercantilism, the very system that genuine "greats" in the field of political economy, such as Adam Smith, have always condemned, contrary to Allen Guelzo's silly and uninformed opinion. Lincoln's ruminations on political economy ranged from wrongheaded to ludicrous. He claimed that protectionist tariffs would cause lower prices, the exact opposite of the truth; he advocated autarky, or the complete prohibition of all imports of anything that could be grown or produced in the U.S., thereby depriving consumers of the benefits of international competition and the division of labor; and he compared the sound-money critics of a central bank run by politicians to Judas in one of his zanier speeches.

Guelzo informs the World Socialist Web Site that Lincoln never had a political thought that did not flow from the Declaration of Independence. What Lincoln actually said, however, is that all of his political thoughts flowed from the politics of Henry Clay, not the Declaration of Independence. He once said that his career aspiration was to be "the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois." DeWitt Clinton was the early nineteenth-century governor of New York who perfected the spoils system during the building of the Erie Canal.

Guelzo also repeats the mantra of Lincoln's supposedly great "love" for the Declaration of Independence. But the Declaration of Independence was a declaration of secession from the British empire. In it the states are described as "free and independent" in the same sense that Great Britain, France, or Spain were "free and independent" states. Lincoln most certainly could not have "loved" the document that proves that America was created by an act of secession, the very principle of the American Revolution.

And of course there is the blather about how Lincoln "did keep the union together." Of course, in reality Lincoln's war destroyed the voluntary union of the founders and replaced it with a coerced, Soviet-style "union" held together literally at gunpoint. Had he not done this, says Guelzo, "This would take the United States off the table as a major world player, and then what would you do with the history of the 20th century?"

Let me take a crack at answering this question. Without U.S. entry into World War I, financed in part by the new national bank of the sort that Lincoln longed for his entire adult life, the European powers would have eventually settled their disputes, as they always had done in the past. There would have been no Versailles Treaty that pushed Germany into the hands of Hitler, and the Russian communists would have been much weaker. Consequently, there would not likely have been a World War II and a 45-year long Cold War that followed.

As a decentralized, federal system that had long ago abolished slavery peacefully, as all the rest of the world did in the nineteenth century (including New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, etc.) America would have been a counter-example to all the world compared to the centralized, socialistic bureaucracies that dominated the 20th century (especially Russia and China and all the other socialist countries).

America may well have not been transformed from a constitutional republic to an empire with military bases in more than 150 countries. Presidents and their propagandists would not have repeated the Lincolnian mantra that "all men everywhere are created equal" to "justify" foreign military intervention in hundreds of places in the name of "spreading democracy and freedom" (but in reality for the purpose of confiscating resources or imposing mercantilism on foreign lands by military force for the benefit of American corporations).

This is not "capitalism" but corporatism or neo-mercantilism. Real capitalism is a system of mutually-advantageous, voluntary trade and does not require imposition at the barrel of a gun. Allen Guelzo is of course oblivious to all of this and relies instead with such silly rhetoric as when he tells the World Socialist Web Site that sleazy, corrupt, politically-connected lawyer/lobbyists like Lincoln were "the shock troops of capitalism."

Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You're Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe, How Capitalism Saved America, and Hamilton's Curse: How Jefferson's Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution — And What It Means for America Today. His latest book is Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government.

The Best of Thomas DiLorenzo at LRC

Thomas DiLorenzo Archives at Mises.org

A couple of years ago when I appeared as one of Ron Paul’s witnesses (the first one, actually) during his House of Representatives hearings on the Fed, the Democrats got the biggest leftist on the committee to smear, libel, and slander me by repeating the smears, libels, and slanders about me (and virtually all other libertarians and conservatives) by the left-wing hate group known as theSouthern Poverty Law Center. The hate group’s typical line is this: 1) DiLorenzo wrote a book critical of Lincoln’s economic policies; 2) Therefore, he must want to bring back slavery. Since we now live in a nation of morons, the SPLC is able to raise millions of dollars in contributions from below-50-I.Q. liberals and leftists with such smears. “Send us money and we will keep an eye on these people,” they say. (This is the same group of communistic crackpots who convinced Big Sister Janet Napolitano to publicly announce that people with Ron Paul bumper stickers on their cars may be considered potential terrorists by her Department of Fatherland Security).

Paul Krugman participated in this libelous smear in one of his NY Timescolumns, labeling me Ron Paul’s “Johnnie Reb economist.” (I prefer that to “politico-journalistic whore”). He said nothing at all about my critiques of the explosion of economic statism during the Lincoln administration, the focus of all my writings on the subject. Instead, he played along with his fellow totalitarians and their meaningless “Neo-Confederate” blather.

But in a recent blog Krugman proved once again what a fraud and a liar he is by writing that “Lincoln was actually a big government interventionist” whose “most dramatic departure from standard economic policy was . . . debasing the currency.” This means that when he participated in the Southern Poverty Law Center smear of yours truly he was obviously cognizant of the fact that libertarians like myself and Ron Paul are critical of Lincoln not because we want to bring back slavery (!!) but because, as Krugman says, he ushered in big-government interventionism and the debasing of the currency with his National Currency Acts and Legal Tender acts.

The purpose of all the over-the-top smears, as outlined in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the “bible” of Obammunists like Krugman, is to censor public criticism of healthcare socialism in particular and Big, Out-of-Control Government in general.

In a recent blog Democratic Party propagandist Paul Krugman claimed that after the Lincoln administration nationalized the money supply with its National Currency Acts, Legal Tender Acts, and the creation of the greenback dollar, “nothing bad happened” during the years when the gold standard was abandoned in the late nineteenth century.

The economics profession knows better. In a scholarly article entitled “Money versus Credit Rationing: Evidence for the National Banking Era, 1880-1914,” by Michael Bordo, Peter Rappoport, and Anna Schwartz (in Claudia Goldin, editor, Strategic Factors in Nineteenth-Century American Economic Growth, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992), the authors concluded that the period of time referred to by Krugman:

“. . . was characterized by monetary and cyclical instability, four banking panics, frequent stock market crashes, and other financial disturbances.” Krugman has a very unique definition of “NOTHING bad.”

Recently by Thomas DiLorenzo: The Sales Tax Price-Fixing ConspiracyAct of2013

A couple of years ago when I appeared as one of Ron Paul’s witnesses (the first one, actually) during his House of Representatives hearings on the Fed, the Democrats got the biggest leftist on the committee to smear, libel, and slander me by repeating the smears, libels, and slanders about me (and virtually all other libertarians and conservatives) by the left-wing hate group known as the Southern Poverty Law Center. The hate group’s typical line is this: 1) DiLorenzo wrote a book critical of Lincoln’s economic policies; 2) Therefore, he must want to bring back slavery. Since we now live in a nation of morons, the SPLC is able to raise millions of dollars in contributions from below-50-I.Q. liberals and leftists with such smears. “Send us money and we will keep an eye on these people,” they say. (This is the same group of communistic crackpots who convinced Big Sister Janet Napolitano to publicly announce that people with Ron Paul bumper stickers on their cars may be considered potential terrorists by her Department of Fatherland Security).

Paul Krugman participated in this libelous smear in one of his NY Times columns, labeling me Ron Paul’s “Johnnie Reb economist.” (I prefer that to “politico-journalistic whore”). He said nothing at all about my critiques of the explosion of economic statism during the Lincoln administration, the focus of all my writings on the subject. Instead, he played along with his fellow totalitarians and their meaningless “Neo-Confederate” blather.

But in a recent blog Krugman proved once again what a fraud and a liar he is by writing that “Lincoln was actually a big government interventionist” whose “most dramatic departure from standard economic policy was . . . debasing the currency.” This means that when he participated in the Southern Poverty Law Center smear of yours truly he was obviously cognizant of the fact that libertarians like myself and Ron Paul are critical of Lincoln not because we want to bring back slavery (!!) but because, as Krugman says, he ushered in big-government interventionism and the debasing of the currency with his National Currency Acts and Legal Tender acts.

The purpose of all the over-the-top smears, as outlined in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the “bible” of Obammunists like Krugman, is to censor public criticism of healthcare socialism in particular and Big, Out-of-Control Government in general.

In a recent blog Democratic Party propagandist Paul Krugman claimed that after the Lincoln administration nationalized the money supply with its National Currency Acts, Legal Tender Acts, and the creation of the greenback dollar, "nothing bad happened" during the years when the gold standard was abandoned in the late nineteenth century.

The economics profession knows better. In a scholarly article entitled "Money versus Credit Rationing: Evidence for the National Banking Era, 1880-1914," by Michael Bordo, Peter Rappoport, and Anna Schwartz (in Claudia Goldin, editor, Strategic Factors in Nineteenth-Century American Economic Growth, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992), the authors concluded that the period of time referred to by Krugman:

". . . was characterized by monetary and cyclical instability, four banking panics, frequent stock market crashes, and other financial disturbances." Krugman has a very unique definition of "NOTHING bad."

Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You're Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe, How Capitalism Saved America, and Hamilton's Curse: How Jefferson's Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution — And What It Means for America Today. His latest book is Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government.

The Best of Thomas DiLorenzo at LRC

Thomas DiLorenzo Archives at Mises.org

One of the main lessons of microeconomics is that price-fixing cartels among businesses always collapse eventually because of cheating by one or more members of the conspiracy. Once one conspirator is revealed to have given secret discounts, the rest know that they’d better follow suit or they will become bankrupt – the price cutter will capture the entire market if they don’t.

A second lesson is historical: Having failed over and over to increase profits with price-fixing conspiracies, many industries have historically recruited the heavy hand of government to enforce the price-fixing conspiracy. The Interstate Commerce Commission enforced a railroad and trucking industry cartel; the Civil Aeronautics Board enforced the airline cartel for more than half a century; and state and local regulatory commissions have enforced cartel pricing in the “public utilities” industries for generations.

State and local governments also conspire to fix tax prices at the highest levels possible, but are often foiled by federalism. Citizens who are unhappy with the high taxes of one jurisdiction can shop in another jurisdiction, if possible, or “vote with their feet” and move there. A case in point is how every state government in America has been salivating over the prospect of taxing internet sales from such companies as Amazon.com that do not have a physical presence in their state. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled such taxes to be unconstitutional in 1992 but Congress is attempting to override that decision with the “Marketplace Fairness Act.” Whenever Congress starts talking about “marketplace fairness” it’s time to hold on to your wallet.

This proposed Act would have the federal government become the price-fixing cartel enforcer for the state governments that would then tax all internet sales from any source. As is the case with most federal intervention, such a law would likely be enforced in such a way that there would be little or no tax competition between the states – the federal government will strive to enforce one single (high) rate of state sales tax for internet purchases.

Any private businesses that attempted such a scheme would be sued by the Federal Trade Commission and/or the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, fined millions of dollars, and jail sentences would be handed down to the price-fixing conspirators. No such thing will happen in this case, of course, because politicians have exempted themselves from liability from price/tax-fixing conspiracies.

If Congress was really interested in promoting “the public interest” during a time when the economy is extremely weak, to say the least, it would be cutting taxes, not orchestrating state government price-fixing conspiracies. Even John Maynard Keynes called for tax cuts, not increases, during recessions and depressions. But government is not the least bit interested in helping the public; it is only interested in helping itself to the public’s hard-earned dollars and to use those dollars to buy votes from various political parasite groups. Americans long ago became the servants rather than masters of their government, and their role here is to pay more and more to finance the pay, perks, and pensions of politicians and bureaucrats and to subsidize their special-interest supporters.

The Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution prohibits the imposition of state taxes on interstate commerce because the founders understood that free interstate trade was essential to prosperity. But as I have said, the government is no longer interested in the well-being of the public (if it ever was): It is interested in its own pay, perks, and pensions, and the more the merrier. Hence its never-ending quest to tax anything and everything. Internet commerce has been a rare bright spot during the “Great Recession” so naturally, the government is attempting to cut if off at the legs with onerous new taxes.

Recently by Thomas DiLorenzo: Spielberg's Sovietization of U.S. History: The Bait-and-Switch Game of ‘HistoricalDocudrama’

One of the main lessons of microeconomics is that price-fixing cartels among businesses always collapse eventually because of cheating by one or more members of the conspiracy. Once one conspirator is revealed to have given secret discounts, the rest know that they'd better follow suit or they will become bankrupt — the price cutter will capture the entire market if they don't.

A second lesson is historical: Having failed over and over to increase profits with price-fixing conspiracies, many industries have historically recruited the heavy hand of government to enforce the price-fixing conspiracy. The Interstate Commerce Commission enforced a railroad and trucking industry cartel; the Civil Aeronautics Board enforced the airline cartel for more than half a century; and state and local regulatory commissions have enforced cartel pricing in the "public utilities" industries for generations.

State and local governments also conspire to fix tax prices at the highest levels possible, but are often foiled by federalism. Citizens who are unhappy with the high taxes of one jurisdiction can shop in another jurisdiction, if possible, or "vote with their feet" and move there. A case in point is how every state government in America has been salivating over the prospect of taxing internet sales from such companies as Amazon.com that do not have a physical presence in their state. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled such taxes to be unconstitutional in 1992 but Congress is attempting to override that decision with the "Marketplace Fairness Act." Whenever Congress starts talking about "marketplace fairness" it's time to hold on to your wallet.

This proposed Act would have the federal government become the price-fixing cartel enforcer for the state governments that would then tax all internet sales from any source. As is the case with most federal intervention, such a law would likely be enforced in such a way that there would be little or no tax competition between the states — the federal government will strive to enforce one single (high) rate of state sales tax for internet purchases.

Any private businesses that attempted such a scheme would be sued by the Federal Trade Commission and/or the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, fined millions of dollars, and jail sentences would be handed down to the price-fixing conspirators. No such thing will happen in this case, of course, because politicians have exempted themselves from liability from price/tax-fixing conspiracies.

If Congress was really interested in promoting "the public interest" during a time when the economy is extremely weak, to say the least, it would be cutting taxes, not orchestrating state government price-fixing conspiracies. Even John Maynard Keynes called for tax cuts, not increases, during recessions and depressions. But government is not the least bit interested in helping the public; it is only interested in helping itself to the public's hard-earned dollars and to use those dollars to buy votes from various political parasite groups. Americans long ago became the servants rather than masters of their government, and their role here is to pay more and more to finance the pay, perks, and pensions of politicians and bureaucrats and to subsidize their special-interest supporters.

The Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution prohibits the imposition of state taxes on interstate commerce because the founders understood that free interstate trade was essential to prosperity. But as I have said, the government is no longer interested in the well-being of the public (if it ever was): It is interested in its own pay, perks, and pensions, and the more the merrier. Hence its never-ending quest to tax anything and everything. Internet commerce has been a rare bright spot during the "Great Recession" so naturally, the government is attempting to cut if off at the legs with onerous new taxes.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You're Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe, How Capitalism Saved America, and Hamilton's Curse: How Jefferson's Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution — And What It Means for America Today. His latest book is Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government.

The Best of Thomas DiLorenzo at LRC

Thomas DiLorenzo Archives at Mises.org

When Steve Spielberg’s movie “Lincoln” came out Time magazine featured interviews with him and his historical advisor on the film, Doris Kearns-Goodwin. Spielberg said the movie is based on part of Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals, because he was so impressed with her scholarship and the great detail and abundance of historical facts in the book. Goodwin herself wrote in Timethat she spent ten years researching and writing the book to assure audiences that the movie was in fact very, very well researched. (This project was commenced shortly after she was kicked off the Pulitzer Prize committee and PBS for confessing to plagiarism related to an earlier book of hers).

Time’s cover story included another article by another historian, in order to further persuade Americans that the movie portrays The True Story about the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution that ended slavery. Another major theme of the movie, one which is accurate but not developed nearly enough, is how much of a political conniver, liar and manipulator Lincoln was, and how he ignored the law and the Constitution in myriad ways. This was brought out in the movie so that the punditry could then editorialize about how President Obama should be “more like Lincoln” and ignore any and all constitutional constraints on presidential powers. The punditry did indeed behave in exactly that way before and after the November election.

A couple of years before the movie came out Goodwin was a pervasive presence on various news programs proclaiming how brilliant and magnanimous Lincoln was to have appointed several former political rivals to his cabinet and praising Obama for doing the same (keeping Bush’s Defense Secretary, for instance). In an LRC article entitled “Team of Liars” I pointed out that numerous presidents had done exactly the same thing for generations prior to the Lincoln presidency; the main theme of Goodwin’s Team of Rivals is therefore trivial and false. Nevertheless, these instances are examples of how dishonest “historians” like Doris Kearns-Goodwin attempt to twist and manipulate history in service of the state.

Yours truly recognized the Spielberg movie as fraudulent from the beginning. In another LRC article entitled “Spielberg’s Upside-Down History” I pointed out that Harvard’s Pulitzer prize-winning historian David Donald, the preeminent mainstream Lincoln historian of our time, wrote in his biography of Lincoln (page 545) that Abe in fact had almost nothing whatsoever to do with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, contrary to the main story line of Spielberg’s movie. In fact, as Donald wrote, when asked by genuine abolitionists in Congress if he would assist them in getting the Amendment passed, Lincoln refused. (He did struggle mightily, however, to try to get a first Thirteenth Amendment, known as the Corwin Amendment, passed in 1861 that would have enshrined slavery explicitly in the U.S Constitution).

To my surprise, a member of Congress recently noticed a glaring falsehood in Spielberg’s “Lincoln” and called him out on it. Congressman Joe Courtney of Connecticut was sitting in the movie theater when he was informed by the film that Connecticut congressmen voted against the Thirteenth Amendment. He smelled a rat, and contacted the Congressional Research Service, which informed him that the “facts” portrayed in the movie are false; the entire Connecticut delegation voted FOR the Thirteenth Amendment.

Congressman Courtney wrote to Spielberg asking him to correct the inaccuracy in the DVD version of the movie but was ignored. Spielberg was painted into a corner: If he did what the congressman requested he would be admitting that his film contained a heavy dose of propaganda, contrary to the great effort that had been made to assure audiences of the movie’s historical accuracy. If he ignored the Congressman he risked having him make a big deal of the issue with further press releases. So Spielberg’s screenwriter, Tony Kushner, eventually came out with a feeble defense of the falsehood by writing in USA Today that the purpose of the now-admitted falsehood was “to clarify to the audience the historical reality” of how the Thirteenth Amendment was passed. There you have it in the words of a famous left-wing Hollywood screenwriter (is there any other kind?) –clarifying historical “reality” for the public requires lying about historical reality.

This is the kind of bait-and-switch game that is played by Hollywood leftists with their statist propaganda films. They trot out “distinguished presidential historians” like the disgraced, confessed plagiarist Doris Kearns-Goodwin to assure audiences of the movie’s historical accuracy, but then when they are caught red handed in a pack of lies they plead “poetic license” and argue that “it’s only a movie, after all, and not a portrayal of reality.” No wonder some people believe that the word “cinema” is a combination of “sin” and “enema.”

Recently by Thomas DiLorenzo: The Rationally Misinformed Voter

When Steve Spielberg's movie "Lincoln" came out Time magazine featured interviews with him and his historical advisor on the film, Doris Kearns-Goodwin. Spielberg said the movie is based on part of Goodwin's book, Team of Rivals, because he was so impressed with her scholarship and the great detail and abundance of historical facts in the book. Goodwin herself wrote in Time that she spent ten years researching and writing the book to assure audiences that the movie was in fact very, very well researched. (This project was commenced shortly after she was kicked off the Pulitzer Prize committee and PBS for confessing to plagiarism related to an earlier book of hers).

Time's cover story included another article by another historian, in order to further persuade Americans that the movie portrays The True Story about the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution that ended slavery. Another major theme of the movie, one which is accurate but not developed nearly enough, is how much of a political conniver, liar and manipulator Lincoln was, and how he ignored the law and the Constitution in myriad ways. This was brought out in the movie so that the punditry could then editorialize about how President Obama should be "more like Lincoln" and ignore any and all constitutional constraints on presidential powers. The punditry did indeed behave in exactly that way before and after the November election.

A couple of years before the movie came out Goodwin was a pervasive presence on various news programs proclaiming how brilliant and magnanimous Lincoln was to have appointed several former political rivals to his cabinet and praising Obama for doing the same (keeping Bush's Defense Secretary, for instance). In an LRC article entitled "Team of Liars" I pointed out that numerous presidents had done exactly the same thing for generations prior to the Lincoln presidency; the main theme of Goodwin's Team of Rivals is therefore trivial and false. Nevertheless, these instances are examples of how dishonest "historians" like Doris Kearns-Goodwin attempt to twist and manipulate history in service of the state.

Yours truly recognized the Spielberg movie as fraudulent from the beginning. In another LRC article entitled "Spielberg's Upside-Down History" I pointed out that Harvard's Pulitzer prize-winning historian David Donald, the preeminent mainstream Lincoln historian of our time, wrote in his biography of Lincoln (page 545) that Abe in fact had almost nothing whatsoever to do with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, contrary to the main story line of Spielberg's movie. In fact, as Donald wrote, when asked by genuine abolitionists in Congress if he would assist them in getting the Amendment passed, Lincoln refused. (He did struggle mightily, however, to try to get a first Thirteenth Amendment, known as the Corwin Amendment, passed in 1861 that would have enshrined slavery explicitly in the U.S Constitution).

To my surprise, a member of Congress recently noticed a glaring falsehood in Spielberg's "Lincoln" and called him out on it. Congressman Joe Courtney of Connecticut was sitting in the movie theater when he was informed by the film that Connecticut congressmen voted against the Thirteenth Amendment. He smelled a rat, and contacted the Congressional Research Service, which informed him that the "facts" portrayed in the movie are false; the entire Connecticut delegation voted FOR the Thirteenth Amendment.

Congressman Courtney wrote to Spielberg asking him to correct the inaccuracy in the DVD version of the movie but was ignored. Spielberg was painted into a corner: If he did what the congressman requested he would be admitting that his film contained a heavy dose of propaganda, contrary to the great effort that had been made to assure audiences of the movie's historical accuracy. If he ignored the Congressman he risked having him make a big deal of the issue with further press releases. So Spielberg's screenwriter, Tony Kushner, eventually came out with a feeble defense of the falsehood by writing in USA Today that the purpose of the now-admitted falsehood was "to clarify to the audience the historical reality" of how the Thirteenth Amendment was passed. There you have it in the words of a famous left-wing Hollywood screenwriter (is there any other kind?) –clarifying historical "reality" for the public requires lying about historical reality.

This is the kind of bait-and-switch game that is played by Hollywood leftists with their statist propaganda films. They trot out "distinguished presidential historians" like the disgraced, confessed plagiarist Doris Kearns-Goodwin to assure audiences of the movie's historical accuracy, but then when they are caught red handed in a pack of lies they plead "poetic license" and argue that "it's only a movie, after all, and not a portrayal of reality." No wonder some people believe that the word "cinema" is a combination of "sin" and "enema."

Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You're Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe, How Capitalism Saved America, and Hamilton's Curse: How Jefferson's Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution — And What It Means for America Today. His latest book is Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government.

The Best of Thomas DiLorenzo at LRC

Thomas DiLorenzo Archives at Mises.org

Recently by Thomas DiLorenzo: Be Patriotic: Become a Secessionist

In the sub-discipline of economics known as public choice, an important concept is the theory of "rational ignorance." First articulated by political scientist Anthony Downs in the 1950s, and expanded upon by economist Gordon Tullock and others, the theory of rational ignorance holds that it is perfectly rational for individuals to largely ignore politics, or even not to vote. There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and we all spend most of our time doing our jobs, pursuing an education, raising families, paying bills, and planning our private lives. We rationally spend very little time becoming informed about politics and government policy.

From an economic perspective, it is irrational for most people to vote in presidential elections since, in a country as big as the United States, the probability that your vote will "make a difference" is about 1/100,000,000, with the denominator being the number of voters. The main reason people vote, therefore, is similar to the reason why they cheer for their favorite sports team. Or, they have been so bombarded with government propaganda for their entire lives that they believe it is their "patriotic duty" to legitimize the state and all that it does by "voicing their consent" at the voting booth.

One consequence of the rational ignorance effect is that, since the general public is largely ignorant of the machinations of the state, political outcomes are controlled by special-interest groups, the largest of which is the state itself and all of its functionaries. This is true as far as it goes, but it is much worse. The average citizen in a democracy is not only rationally ignorant, but rationally misinformed, thanks to the relentless statist propaganda that is drummed into the heads of nearly everyone beginning in pre-school. The entire educational system in America has become one gigantic, state-funded statist brainwashing operation.

Once Americans have been thoroughly indoctrinated in statism for at least twelve years, that indoctrination is then reinforced by the lapdog media, Hollywood, and the popular culture in general. It is much easier to plunder and exert totalitarian control over a society in which at least half of the adult population is comprised of brain-numbed morons who will believe in almost any lie or superstition as long as it has a governmental imprimatur.

Hence we have millions of people who believe that disarming all the law-abiding citizens so that only dangerous criminals can possess firearms will make us safer. They believe that their children are safer in public schools if there is no one there — not a single person — who could protect them from a crazed murderer by carrying a firearm and knowing how to use it.

Millions of Americans believe that jobs and prosperity are created when the government takes more money out of their bank accounts and gives the money to government bureaucrats to spend on themselves and their political supporters. They are sermonized about this several times a week by Paul Krugman in the New York Times.

Most Americans believe that they are safer in the world the more involved their government's military is in launching terroristic bombing attacks by air on more and more countries, under whatever pretense announced by D.C. They believe that if the U.S. government murders hundreds of thousands of children in such bombings then, well, it is just a price that WE should be willing to pay for peace in the world. They also believe that such murderous acts will not motivate anyone in those countries to even think about retaliating against Americans.

Millions of Americans believe that "fairness" occurs whenever the government discriminates against hard-working, frugal, far-sighted, self-educated, law-abiding, and economically-successful families and gives that money away to welfare bums and parasites. There are millions of Americans who pay no income taxes at all who believe that the "top two percent" of income earners who pay almost 90 percent of all federal income taxes are "not paying their fair share."

Millions of Americans believe that they are helping to avert a global environmental catastrophe that could end life on earth by lugging bottles and cans and paper bags out to the street every week for the "recycling truck," which may well just throw it all in the dump with all the other garbage.

Millions of Americans believe that treating people according to the content of their character and not the color of their skin means that racial hiring and college admission quotas should be enforced by the state.

When a company like Wal-Mart begins selling groceries 30-40 percent cheaper than unionized grocery stores, it almost goes without saying that they are to be condemned as social outlaws who abuse both their employees and their customers. That's what the labor unions instruct us to do.

Most Americans believe that Abraham Lincoln "saved" the voluntary union of states that was created by the founding fathers, based on the principle that government's just powers are derived from the consent of the governed by micromanaging the waging of total war on Americans who no longer consented to being governed by Washington, D.C., killing hundreds of thousands of them.

Most Americans also think of Lincoln as a racial saint even though he advocated the deportation of all black people all of his adult life, to his dying day. He also opposed inter-racial marriage or allowing black people to vote or serve on juries or even to reside in his home state of Illinois. They think of him as a "great statesman" even though he manipulated his country into the bloodiest war in American history where as many as 850,000 Americans died according to the latest research. This is the kind of thing "great statesmen" do, we are all told in the government schools.

It has been widely reported that the main reason why Barack Obama was reelected was that millions of Americans believed that this particular multi-millionaire "cares more about people like me" than the other multi-millionaire who was his rival.

This list of American idiocy could go on forever, and is a testament to the overwhelming success of the American state in not just "dumbing down" the population, as many have claimed, but in creating a society comprised of millions of dunces and robots who can always be counted on to "legitimize" anything and everything the state does at election time. As the nineteenth-century pundit Josh Billings, who was a contemporary of Mark Twain's, once said: "The trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so."

Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You're Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe, How Capitalism Saved America, and Hamilton's Curse: How Jefferson's Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution — And What It Means for America Today. His latest book is Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government.

The Best of Thomas DiLorenzo at LRC

Thomas DiLorenzo Archives at Mises.org

Recently by Thomas DiLorenzo: Spielberg's Upside-Down History: The Myth of Lincoln and the ThirteenthAmendment

Abraham Lincoln, his administration, and members of the U.S. Congress committed treason when they levied war against the Southern states in 1861-1865. This fact is clearly proven by the plain words of Article 3, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution that defines treason as follows:

"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them , or in adhering to their enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort" (emphasis added).

As in all the founding documents, the phrase "United States" is in the plural, signifying the free, independent and sovereign states. The free and independent states were united in ratifying the Constitution and delegating a few powers to the national government (Article 1, Section 8), while reserving all others for the people, respectively, or the states, as stated in the Tenth Amendment. If the American people were to be the masters rather than the servants of their national government, the only way they could do so would be through political communities organized at the state and local levels. This of course is how the Constitution was ratified — by political conventions of the states, as directed by Article 7 of the Constitution. Since Lincoln never admitted that secession was legal or constitutional, and insisted that the Southern states had never actually left the American union, he knowingly committed treason as defined by the Constitution by invading the Southern states.

Secession and nullification — or the threat thereof — were held to be essential tools in disciplining the central state (See my LRC article entitled "The Secession Tradition in America"). This is the true history of the founding. The Hamiltonian nationalists, however, waged a decades-long propaganda war to rewrite history in order to achieve their objective of consolidating all political power at the national level, thereby destroying America's constitutional republic and turning it into a militaristic, corporatist empire. Hamilton himself got the ball rolling by telling the outrageous lie that the states were never sovereign but were somehow magically created by the peoples' masters in the nation's capitol. This insidious lie was repeated by generations of Hamiltonian nationalists such as Chief Justice John Marshall, Justice Joseph Story, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln. As part of this Soviet-style rewriting of history the nationalists, beginning with Story and Webster, redefined treason to mean criticism or opposition to the central government — precisely the opposite of the actual meaning of treason in the Constitution. Lincoln used this false definition of treason to "justify" levying war against his own countrymen not to "save the union," which was a voluntary political arrangement, but to finally realize the Hamiltonian nationalist goal of a consolidated, centralized, monopolistic government in Washington, D.C.

The new Hamiltonian regime would become an unlimited democracy "of the people, by the people, for the people." It would not be an American democracy, however, with most governmental decisions being made in a decentralized system dominated by the people of the states and localities. Instead, it would become a French Jacobin- style "democracy" with "the majority will" defined for the public by a massive, consolidated, centralized governmental bureaucracy in the national capitol.

Many Americans have finally come to realize this, and this realization motivates the new American secessionist movement under which every single state has sent a secession petition to the White House. Texas has reportedly led the way with a petition said to contain more than 120,000 signatures.

The government establishment has of course sneered and screeched at this development, screaming "treason" and recommending the deportation of petition signers. "Traitors" to the "glorious union" should be deported, they say. But what is this union, anyway, and why would any patriotic, liberty-loving American want to preserve it? Let us count some of the reasons why patriotic Americans should hate the cursed union and seek to secede from it.

Far from protecting "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," as promised in the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. government has become a worldwide killing machine that seems to have no concern whatsoever for the lives of innocents in foreign countries, and little more concern for the lives of American soldiers who it sends on Quixotic missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other forlorn places that pose no threat at all to Americans. American foreign policy can be described as perpetual war that creates perpetual, endless enemies for American citizens all around the globe, just so political elites can profit from war politically and economically. It makes life much more dangerous for every American.

Economist Thomas Sowell has written that, although there are many fine public school teachers, the unionized government school monopoly is generally so decrepit that the average "public" school teacher probably "ruins the lives" of about 10,000 children during the course of his or her career.

The war on drugs has long been the chief cause of violent crime in the nation's cities, but will probably never end because there is too much money in it for the war-on-drugs bureaucracy, including the police, the courts, the DEA, the government schools, and other special-interests.

Some 50,000 people per year die on the socialized, government highway system. America's massive welfare state has ruined the lives of millions by detaching generations from the workplace, turning them into unproductive social parasites (but reliable voters for bigger and bigger government). Not to mention causing massive family break-up.

Police thuggery has become legendary, with endless news stories of police beating and tasering citizens, sometimes to death. And we used to criticize the communists for street-level executions. The police are, at best, crime historians who show up after a crime has been committed, write up a report, and then use the report to lobby for more money to hire more police, who take down more reports . . . . There are also relentless efforts to disarm the American public and water down or destroy the Second Amendment (and all the other Amendments for that matter).

The notion that the U.S. government protects life and liberty is the most absurd proposition imaginable. Government is always and everywhere the enemy of liberty, and nowhere more so than in an unlimited democracy such as the U.S. has become. No one's property is safe as long as the legislature is in session. Taxes at all levels of government confiscate at least 40 percent of all national income; the unfunded liabilities of government, i.e., promises of future plunder that politicians know they can never keep, are said to exceed $100 trillion; the national government now routinely spends more than $1 trillion more each year than it collects in taxes; and more than 80,000 pages of small-print regulations in The Federal Register threaten to destroy American capitalism once and for all. Indeed, many politicians in Washington, especially the president, seem absolutely thrilled by that prospect and do everything they can to quicken the pace of destruction. As this is being written there is even talk in the news of the elimination of the tax deductibility of charitable contributions, which would destroy many charities, providing yet another rationale for even more government bureaucracy.

The Federal Reserve's monetary monopoly creates endless boom-and-bust cycles, which Fed bureaucrats then blame on "capitalism." They use the busts that they have created as an excuse to give themselves even more central planning powers. For example, after the Fed caused the real estate bubble and the subsequent "Great Recession," Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke quickly blamed the recession on the free enterprise system, which he publicly mocked with a smirk on his face, while making the case for a new government bureaucracy to regulate "systemic risk." Besides this, the only "remedy" for the recession that has been offered by the Fed is more of the exact same policies of "quantitative easing" that caused the recession in the first place. And of course the Fed is accountable to no one, not even Congress.

The U.S. has become one giant plunder-seeking society whereby the "net tax consumers" now outnumber the "net taxpayers." About half of all working adults pay no federal income tax but collect government handouts. They are therefore a very reliable voting block for endlessly increasing the income taxes on the productive, taxpaying class. This will only get worse.

The U.S. is also a fascistic, corporate welfare state that uses billions of tax dollars to bail out failing businesses and industries and their unions. This is poisonous to the capitalist system, which relies crucially on the market feedback system that rewards good performance with profits and penalizes poor business performance with losses. That's what causes capital to be reallocated to more productive uses over time (i.e., uses that actually please consumers). The American system of privatized profits (for the politically-connected) and socialized losses was also a hallmark of fascist Germany and Italy during the 1930s. Subsidizing failure will inevitably lead to more failure. It will continue forever, though, because the politicians who vote for the subsidies receive kickbacks from the corporate welfare recipients in the form of "campaign contributions," high-paying jobs for spouses and relatives, and cushy post-congressional careers.

The U.S has also become a creepy police state with some cities employing literally thousands of spy cameras and red light cameras. There are now unmanned drones flying about, in addition to satellites in space that can peer through the windows of houses. An FBI "whistleblower" recently stated that the FBI is even in possession of technology to eavesdrop on text messages.

The America "union" ceased being a union of the people of the free and independent states in 1865. Today the "union" simply means the political plundering class in Washington, D.C., with all off its welfare/warfare state parasites, lobbyists, and propagandists in the media and academe. That is what one would be leaving behind by seceding. So be patriotic and become a secessionist.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You're Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe, How Capitalism Saved America, and Hamilton's Curse: How Jefferson's Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution — And What It Means for America Today. His latest book is Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government.

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Recently by Thomas DiLorenzo: Why the Totalitarians Among Us LoveLincoln

"Armies of scholars, meticulously investigating every aspect of [Lincoln's] life, have failed to find a single act of racial bigotry on his part."

~ Doris Kearns-Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, p. 207.

"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people . . . . I as much as any man am in favor of the superior position assigned to the white race."

~ Abraham Lincoln, First Lincoln-Douglas Debate, Ottawa, Illinois, Sept. 18, 1858, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln vol.3, pp. 145-146.

Steven Spielberg's new movie, Lincoln, is said to be based on several chapters of the book Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns-Goodwin, who was a consultant to Spielberg. The main theme of the movie is how clever, manipulative, conniving, scheming, lying, and underhanded Lincoln supposedly was in using his "political skills" to get the Thirteenth Amendment that legally ended slavery through the U.S. House of Representatives in the last months of his life. This entire story is what Lerone Bennett, Jr. the longtime executive editor of Ebony magazine and author of Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream, calls a "pleasant fiction." It never happened.

It never happened according to the foremost authority on Lincoln among mainstream Lincoln scholars, Harvard University Professor David H. Donald, the recipient of several Pulitzer prizes for his historical writings, including a biography of Lincoln. David Donald is the preeminent Lincoln scholar of our time who began writing award-winning books on the subject in the early 1960s. On page 545 of his magnus opus, Lincoln, Donald notes that Lincoln did discuss the Thirteenth Amendment with two members of Congress – James M. Ashley of Ohio and James S. Rollins of Missouri. But if he used "means of persuading congressmen to vote for the Thirteeth Amendment," the theme of the Spielberg movie, "his actions are not recorded. Conclusions about the President's role rested on gossip . . ."

Moreover, there is not a shred of evidence that even one Democratic member of Congress changed his vote on the Thirteenth Amendment (which had previously been defeated) because of Lincoln's actions. Donald documents that Lincoln was told that some New Jersey Democrats could possibly be persuaded to vote for the amendment "if he could persuade [Senator] Charles Sumner to drop a bill to regulate the Camden & Amboy [New Jersey] Railroad, but he declined to intervene" (emphasis added). "One New Jersey Democrat," writes David Donald, "well known as a lobbyist for the Camden & Amboy, who had voted against the amendment in July, did abstain in the final vote, but it cannot be proved that Lincoln influenced his change" (emphasis added). Thus, according to the foremost authority on Lincoln, there is no evidence at all that Lincoln influenced even a single vote in the U.S. House of Representatives, in complete contradiction of the writings of the confessed plagiarist Doris Kearns-Goodwin and Steven Spielberg's movie (See my review of Goodwin's book, entitled "A Plagiarist's Contribution to Lincoln Idolatry").

Lincoln's First Thirteenth Amendment Gambit

There is no evidence that Lincoln provided any significant assistance in the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in the House of Representatives in 1865, but there is evidence of his effectiveness in getting an earlier Thirteenth Amendment through the House and the Senate in 1861. This proposed amendment was known as the "Corwin Amendment," named after Ohio Republican Congressman Thomas Corwin. It had passed both the Republican-controlled House and the Republican-dominated U.S. Senate on March 2, 1861, two days before Lincoln's inauguration, and was sent to the states for ratification by Lincoln himself.

The Corwin Amendment would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering with Southern slavery. It read as follows:

"No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State,, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State."

"Person held to service" is how the Constitutional Convention referred to slaves, and "domestic institutions" referred to slavery. Lincoln announced to the world that he endorsed the Corwin Amendment in his first inaugural address:

"I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution — which amendment, however, I have not seen — has passed Congress to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service . . . . [H]olding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable" (emphasis added).

Believing that slavery was already constitutional, Lincoln had "no objection" to enshrining it explicitly in the text of the U.S. Constitution on the day that he took office. He then sent a letter to the governor of each state transmitting the approved amendment for what he hoped would be ratification and noting that his predecessor, President James Buchanan, had also endorsed it.

Lincoln played a much larger role in getting this first Thirteenth Amendment through Congress than merely endorsing it in his first inaugural address and in his letter to the governors. Even Doris Kearns-Goodwin knows this! On page 296 of Team of Rivals she explained how it was Lincoln who, after being elected but before the inauguration, instructed New York Senator William Seward, who would become his secretary of state, to get the amendment through the U.S. Senate. He also instructed Seward to get a federal law passed that would repeal the personal liberty laws in some of the Northern states that were used by those states to nullify the federal Fugitive Slave Act, which Lincoln strongly supported. (The Fugitive Slave Act forced Northerners to hunt down runaway slaves and return them to their owners).

As Goodwin writes: "He [Lincoln] instructed Seward to introduce these proposals in the Senate Committee of Thirteen without indicating they issued from Springfield [Illinois]. The first resolved that u2018the Constitution should never be altered so as to authorize Congress to abolish or interfere with slavery in the states.'" The second proposal was that "All state personal liberty laws in opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law be repealed."

So, go and see Spielberg's Lincoln movie if you must, but keep in mind that it is just another left-wing Hollywood fantasy.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You're Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe, How Capitalism Saved America, and Hamilton's Curse: How Jefferson's Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution — And What It Means for America Today. His latest book is Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government.

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Recently by Thomas DiLorenzo: The American Tradition of Secession

"It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing [political] interests, and render them all subservient to the public good."

~ James Madison, Federalist #10

"The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge . . . is itself a frightful despotism."

~ George Washington's Farewell Address

"That government is best which governs least."

~ Thomas Jefferson

One of the distinctive features of my book, The Real Lincoln, is that unlike almost all other books on the subject, I portray the sixteenth president as a real-life, flesh-and-blood politician. I quoted Murray Rothbard, who described Lincoln as a "master politician" which, to Rothbard, meant that he was a masterful liar, conniver, and manipulator. I also quoted the Pulitzer prize-winning Lincoln biographer, David Donald, as saying that Lincoln was "the master string puller" of Illinois politics before he ran for president. He was just as motivated by a compulsive quest for money and power as any other successful politician, I wrote.

This drew an avalanche of condemnation and calumny from the Lincoln cult, especially the "Straussian" neocons, who never seem to be able to stop raising money to erect more statues of Lincoln on college campuses and elsewhere. Even if Lincoln was a wily politician, they condescendingly pontificated, one must first be a politician before become a "statesman."

All of this has changed. Various neocons are now celebrating the fact that Lincoln was exactly as I portrayed him as being: a lying, conniving, manipulating politician. In doing so they have finally removed their masks and revealed themselves to be totalitarian-minded fascists whose beliefs are patently un-American, if one compares their beliefs to those of Washington, Madison and Jefferson as quoted at the top of this article. The vehicle for the new neocon celebration of Lincolnian political chicanery is Steven Spielberg's new Lincoln movie.

Exhibit A of this totalitarian mindset is a November 22 New York Times article by David Brooks entitled "Why We Love Politics." (Can you imagine Washington, Madison, or Jefferson ever saying such a childish thing?). Compared to the traditional American ideal of limited constitutional government as espoused by the founding fathers, Brooks continues to advocate virtually unlimited government by praising to the treetops the "nobility of politics" that is portrayed in Steven Spielberg's new "Lincoln" movie. Rather than warning of "the violence of [political] faction," as James Madison did, Brooks declares that "you can do more good in politics than in any other sphere." Of course, "you" can also create great "enormities" through politics, as George Washington warned in his farewell address. The Holocaust and the South African Apartheid system were both government programs, after all, to name just two examples. Politics protected and even subsidized American slavery for generations, let us not forget. It has plunged us into myriad unnecessary wars, and all the death and destruction that goes with it.

"Politics is the best place to develop the highest virtues," Brooks argues, while denigrating "young people especially" who he sneers at for being concerned more with community service than national politics. And what are these "virtues" according to David Brooks? They are on display in the Spielberg movie, he says, with all of Lincoln's political maneuverings. He heaps mountains of praise on Lincoln for being so willing to "bamboozle, trim, compromise and be slippery and hypocritical;" to "take morally hazardous action"; to "ignore court decisions, dole out patronage, play legalistic games," and "deceive . . . supporters." The "highest virtues" indeed, New York Times style.

In The Road to Serfdom F.A. Hayek pointed out that a characteristic of a totalitarian mindset, one that distinguishes it from individualism, is a belief in the notion that "the ends justify the means." All of the worst totalitarians of Hayek's day espoused this view, from Stalin to Hitler and Mussolini. To Stalin, the end of a "communist paradise" was said to justify any means — even the murder of tens of millions of dissenters. Petty totalitarians like David Brooks, who would probably never personally harm a fly, also espouse this dangerous, anti-social ideology and urge the rest of us to do so as well. Getting the Thirteenth Amendment through Congress, the main theme of the Spielberg movie, is said to have been "justified" by any means.

But the Spielberg Lincoln movie gets its history completely upside down. The main story line is how Lincoln supposedly utilized every bit of his political sleaziness to help get the Thirteenth Amendment through Congress. This is a fiction. It never happened according to the preeminent Lincoln scholar of our time, Harvard University's David Donald (See page 554 of his Pulitzer prize-winning biography of Lincoln). In fact, the opposite was true: The genuine abolitionists in Congress had to use their political powers to get Lincoln to voice his support for the Thirteenth Amendment. Spielberg's movie, based on the book Team of Rivals by the confessed plagiarist Doris Kearns-Goodwin, is an extraordinarily misleading work of fiction. (See my LRC review of Goodwin's book entitled "A Plagiarist's Contribution to Lincoln Idolatry").

Lest the reader believe that I am exaggerating by using the word "fascism" to describe the political views of neocons like David Brooks, consider this: Among the defining characteristics of twentieth-century European fascism were militarism; a worshipful attitude toward the state and politics; the denigration of individual liberty, free enterprise, and the civil society; dictatorial executive branch powers; and a philosophy of "the common good before self interest." These are also the defining characteristics of self-described "national greatness conservatives" like David Brooks and William Kristol, and they explain why they are such Lincoln idolaters.

"Politics is noble because it involves personal compromise for the public good," Brooks writes in his New York Times column, echoing the sentiments of Mussolini himself. "The fascist conception of life, Benito Mussolini wrote in Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions (p. 10), "stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with the State." German fascism was based on the identical philosophy of "the common good comes before the private good." In German, "Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigenntz." Under fascism "the common good" was defined for the public by politicians and their advisors. The public never had any voice in defining what was supposedly good for it.

In a 1997 Weekly Standard cover article Brooks condemned genuine, limited-government conservatives as being "besotted with localism, local communities, and the devolution of power." He advocated an unlimited expansion of the powers of the federal government for any reason because, he said, "energetic government is good for its own sake." War — any war — would be the most desirable way to create this "good" according to neocons like David Brooks. All of this "greatness" is now on display in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.

In a 1997 Wall Street Journal article co-authored with William Kristol Brooks advocated compulsory "national service" for all American youths; a "mission" to Mars, and endless foreign policy interventionism. "It almost doesn't matter what great task government sets for itself," they wrote. For "ultimately, American purpose can find its voice only in Washington."

This is an incredibly totalitarian statement, implying that there is such a thing as one single "American voice." In reality, of course, there are millions of different "voices" in a democracy where there is never unanimous opinion on anything. That is why there is no such thing as "the public interest" in the context of democratic politics. As Ludwig von Mises wrote in Liberalism, one can argue that such institutions as private property are in "the public interest" in that they benefit the entire society, but this is never true of government policy. The language of "American purpose" presumes the opposite — that there is such a thing as unanimous political opinion.

It is statements such as these that explain why all of the totalitarians in our midst, i.e., those who wish to control our every behavior through government, have such a wildly celebratory attitude toward the Spielberg Lincoln movie. Left-wing propagandists like Doris Kearns-Goodwin, author of hagiographies of Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedys, and Lincoln, and right-wing propagandists like David Brooks and his fellow neocons, are all part of a phony "team of rivals" who pose as political competitors. In reality, they all are part of an establishment cabal that views those of us who are "besotted" with ideas about liberty and freedom as their true enemies and roadblocks to their own personal wealth and glory disguised by the language of "national greatness" and mythical and false accounts of American history.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You're Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe, How Capitalism Saved America, and Hamilton's Curse: How Jefferson's Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution — And What It Means for America Today. His latest book is Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government.

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