Rothbard on Lincoln

I recently re-read the essay “America’s Two Just Wars: 1775 and 1861” by the late, great Murray Rothbard.  It reminded me once again of how Murray’s tremendous knowledge of history, economics, and philosophy (among other things) enabled him to pursue the truth like no other person I have ever met (and I have been privileged to have met such intellectual giants as Nobel laureates F.A. Hayek,  Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, George Stigler, James Buchanan, and Vernon Smith).  Here are a few of Murray’s trenchant comments in the article:

“So, if the Articles of Confederation could be treated as a scrap of paper, if delegation to the confederate government in the 1780s was revocable, how could the central government set up under the Constitution . . .  claim that its powers were permanent and irrevocable? . . .  [T]hat monstrous illogic is precisely the doctrine proclaimed by the North, by the Union, during the War Between the States. ”

“The central grievance of the American rebels was the taxing power: the systematic plunder of their property by the British government  . . .   One of the central grievances of the South, too, was the tariff that Northerners imposed on Southerners whose major income came from exporting cotton abroad.”

“The Republican Party [of the 19th century] was known as the ‘party of great moral ideas’ . . .   On the economic level, the Republicans adopted the Whig program of statism and big government: protective tariffs, subsidies to big business, strong central government, large-scale public works, and cheap credit spurred by government.”

“[T]he southern United States was the only place in the 19th century where slavery was abolished by fire and by ‘terrible swift sword.’  In every other part of the New World, slavery was peacefully bought out by agreement with slaveholders.”

“[Abraham Lincoln’s] major emphasis was on Whig economic statism: high tariffs, huge subsidies to railroads, public works . . .  Lincoln was virtually the candidate from the Illinois Central and the other large railroads.”

“Lincoln’s major focus was on raising taxes, in particular raising and enforcing the tariff.”

“In his First Inaugural, Lincoln was conciliatory about maintaining slavery; what he was hard-line about toward the South was insistence on collecting all the customs tariffs in that region.”

“Lincoln was a master politician, which means that he was a consummate conniver, manipulator, and liar.”

“Lincoln managed to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt and Henry Stimson did at Pearl Harbor 80 years later — maneuvered the Southerners into firing first against a federal fort . . .”

“There is no heresy greater . . . than sacralizing the secular.  But this monstrous process is precisely what happened when Abraham Lincoln and his northern colleagues made a god out of the Union.”

“The Northern war was the very opposite of honorable . . . . the North insisted on creating a conscript army . . . and broke the 19th century rules of war by specifically plundering and slaughtering civilians . . .”

“[W]e must . . . never forget, we must put in the dock and hang higher than Haman, those who, in modern times, opened the Pandora’s Box of genocide and the extermination of civilians: Sherman, Grant, and Lincoln.”

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12:21 pm on January 20, 2010