I highly recommend Jeff Tucker’s eloquent and informative “Tribute to Jack Kemp” (R.I.P.) on mises.org. Jack Kemp became a crusader for free enterprise and lower taxes upon entering Congress in the late 1970s but was eventually corrupted by the neocon Republican Party establishment (which eventually dumped him after he opposed the Iraq war). He was one of my favorite politicians for a while, as he was a very articulate voice in favor of free enterprise, something that seemed to come naturally from the former Buffalo Bills quarterback.
I got a glimpse of his corruption by the G.O.P. establishment sometime around 1990, however, at an academic economics conference in D.C. on the topic of “Laffer Curves.” I was assigned to briefly discuss a paper by Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway that argued that the growth of government didn’t significantly harm private sector growth until the 1960s. My main point, in front of an audience of about 200, including Jack Kemp, was that Vedder and Gallaway didn’t go back far enough with their data — that the War Between the States was probably the real “breaking point,” not the “Great Society.” I said that it seemed to me that the adoption of income taxation, military conscription, an internal revenue bureaucracy, the National Currency Acts, massive corporate welfare for the railroads, pervasive excise taxation, 50 percent average tariff rates, and a military-industrial complex, was a major watershed event in American economic history that would eventually have very negative effects on private sector economic growth.
I never mentioned the name “Lincoln” once, but once I began citing the economic interventions of the Lincoln administration Jack Kemp began booing and hissing. At one point I stopped to ask, sarcastically, if someone else was scheduled to speak at that time. Kemp then stormed out of the hotel ballroom and was heard saying “that guy attacked my hero.”
This was an early lesson for me about how the G.O.P. demands that its politicians all become bubble-headed Lincoln worshippers — or else. Even being in the same room as a Lincoln critic can ruin one’s political career. It reminds me of how the KGB severely cracked down on any government official who was even rumored to have expressed anything but positive thoughts about Stalin.
