I knew it was the 21st century. I think it would be nice once everybody finally got the hell out of the 19th!
No mercy.
Coming soon: Tha SYNDICATE.
101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that Internet Explorer cannot.
Posted on 11/11/2002 1:23:27 PM PST by l8pilot
Evidence Builds for DiLorenzo’s Lincoln by Paul Craig Roberts
In an excellent piece of historical research and economic exposition, two economics professors, Robert A. McGuire of the University of Akron and T. Norman Van Cott of Ball State University, have provided independent evidence for Thomas J. Dilorenzo’s thesis that tariffs played a bigger role in causing the Civil War than slavery.
In The Real Lincoln, DiLorenzo argues that President Lincoln invaded the secessionist South in order to hold on to the tariff revenues with which to subsidize Northern industry and build an American Empire. In "The Confederate Constitution, Tariffs, and the Laffer Relationship" (Economic Inquiry, Vol. 40, No. 3, July 2002), McGuire and Van Cott show that the Confederate Constitution explicitly prohibits tariff revenues from being used "to promote or foster any branch of industry." By prohibiting subsidies to industries and tariffs high enough to be protective, the Confederates located their tax on the lower end of the "Laffer curve."
The Confederate Constitution reflected the argument of John C. Calhoun against the 1828 Tariff of Abominations. Calhoun argued that the U.S. Constitution granted the tariff "as a tax power for the sole purpose of revenue – a power in its nature essentially different from that of imposing protective or prohibitory duties."
McGuire and Van Cott conclude that the tariff issue was a major factor in North-South tensions. Higher tariffs were "a key plank in the August 1860 Republican party platform. . . . northern politicians overall wanted dramatically higher tariff rates; Southern politicians did not."
"The handwriting was on the wall for the South," which clearly understood that remaining in the union meant certain tax exploitation for the benefit of the north.
October 16, 2002
Dr. Roberts [send him mail] is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions Evidence Builds for DiLorenzo’s Lincoln by Paul Craig Roberts
In an excellent piece of historical research and economic exposition, two economics professors, Robert A. McGuire of the University of Akron and T. Norman Van Cott of Ball State University, have provided independent evidence for Thomas J. Dilorenzo’s thesis that tariffs played a bigger role in causing the Civil War than slavery.
In The Real Lincoln, DiLorenzo argues that President Lincoln invaded the secessionist South in order to hold on to the tariff revenues with which to subsidize Northern industry and build an American Empire. In "The Confederate Constitution, Tariffs, and the Laffer Relationship" (Economic Inquiry, Vol. 40, No. 3, July 2002), McGuire and Van Cott show that the Confederate Constitution explicitly prohibits tariff revenues from being used "to promote or foster any branch of industry." By prohibiting subsidies to industries and tariffs high enough to be protective, the Confederates located their tax on the lower end of the "Laffer curve."
The Confederate Constitution reflected the argument of John C. Calhoun against the 1828 Tariff of Abominations. Calhoun argued that the U.S. Constitution granted the tariff "as a tax power for the sole purpose of revenue – a power in its nature essentially different from that of imposing protective or prohibitory duties."
McGuire and Van Cott conclude that the tariff issue was a major factor in North-South tensions. Higher tariffs were "a key plank in the August 1860 Republican party platform. . . . northern politicians overall wanted dramatically higher tariff rates; Southern politicians did not."
"The handwriting was on the wall for the South," which clearly understood that remaining in the union meant certain tax exploitation for the benefit of the north.
October 16, 2002
Dr. Roberts [send him mail] is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions
I always thought that war with the secessionist South started because the South seceded.
I knew it was the 21st century. I think it would be nice once everybody finally got the hell out of the 19th!
No mercy.
Coming soon: Tha SYNDICATE.
101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that Internet Explorer cannot.
And shot at people, who shot back, and then came a callin' whereupon there was more shootin.
Only if you ignore the writings and speeches of the leaders of the time.
BTW, I don't suppose that McGuire's and Van Cott's research uncovered the fact that one of the first acts of the confederate congress was to impose...are you ready for this... a protectionist tariff? One of the reasons why the lack of a confederate supreme court was so handy. Nobody around to tell you it was unconstitutional.
BTW, since this was such a 'serious' concern, exactly how many members did the Abolition Party (percentage wise of entire population) have circa 1860 in the north?
Yah, tariff revenues were real important. Oh, that slavery stuff, who cared about that? These guys are in denial worse than the Democratic National Committee.
I am not sure if he isn't overstating the case here for DiLorenzo.
Certainly economic issues - tariffs especially - played a larger role than is usually credited. North and South were not only defined by greatly different societies, but economies as well. And the impact of tariffs on each was certainly dichotomous.
But did they have a greater impact than slavery in causing the war?
Perhaps the the way to approach the question is this: Ask ourselves if it is possible to imagine the war erupting without either issue. Can we conceived of the election of 1860 - and the consequent secession of eleven states - unfolding as it did without slavery? Or without the tariff issue?
I have difficulty conceiving of the former. I think that the conflict between the two could have been resolved peacefully if the issues involved were merely economic.
Tariffs did not stir the blood like slavery did. John Brown did not massacre Kansas settlers or raid Harpers Ferry over tariffs. Lincoln did not demolish the Little Giant's presidential aspirations - or largely cement his own - over the issue of tariffs in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Sumner did not get his head beat in on the Senate floor over tariffs. The Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraksa Acts were primarily addressed to slavery, not tariffs. Lincoln failed to draw a single vote in five southern states, and while many of them may have been lost over the issue of tariffs, I think one would be hard pressed to argue that most men down there didn't have the slavery issue foremost on their minds when they entered their polling stations.
But perhaps the larger point missed is that the two issues are ultimately intertwined. Slavery was part and parcel of the South's economic system - which by its nature was overwhelmingly agrarian and oriented to large-scale exports of cheaply produced and therefore competitively priced agricultural goods (i.e., cotton) and therefore vulnerable to the consequences of industrial tariffs. Trying to separate the two issues is not so easy as DiLorenzo seems to suggest.
In the end, however, what separation we can achieve point more to slavery. Contemporary accounts point to the passions engendered by chattel slavery; to cite even a tithe is to belabor the point. Without that passion it is very difficult indeed to conceive of the Civil War as we know it.
In the end, however, one suspects larger agendas being advanced in this endless debate over the Civil War's causes. I fail to see why it is necessary to cleanse the Confederacy's moral stature to advance a true understanding of the need to return to a federalism approximating that envisioned by the Founding Fathers - a goal that all of us here share.
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