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
You apparently know as little of German history as you do Arab.
Are you suggesting that Adolf Hitler, the "assasin of the workers",supported the world wide struggle of the workers? That, after all, is the goal of socialism.
Showing you up for the ignorant fool that you are is like shooting fish in a barrel, and not very sporting. But it's still fun.
How was Hitler "the assasin (sic) of the workers". Hitler revived the German economy, put people back to work, and even endeavored to provide the ordinary German with an automobile. (Have you never heard of the Volkswagon?) Marxist communism was an international movement, but socialism was not inherently internationalist and was in fact quite capable of being nationalistic.
Well, it's not much of a stretch from supporting the slave power to supporting Hitler, but I never thought you'd admit it so readily.
Walt
You'd think any 10th grader would know that.
Walt
That statement just goes to show how wrong you can be. There is no inherent contradiction whatever between nationalism and socialism. Marxist communism was internationalist, but there is nothing inherent in in the notion of socialism that prevents it from being nationalistic. The whole idea of there being a generic something called "fascism", (with a little "f"), as distinguished from the specifically Italian "Fascism" is basically just a leftist propaganda tool. But, if you insist on a general notion of "fascism" then I think it should be defined as follows: a fascist state is a totalitarian socialist regime not explicitly based on the Marxist model and nationalist rather than internalist in its character and aims. Sweden is probably the only extant fascist state among the industrialized western nations, but many others are a close approximation.
There is nothing in my statement to suggest support of Hitler, nor have I ever been, as I have told you over and over, a supporter of the non-existent entity that you call the the "slave power". And you have just demonstrated yourself, in a singulary manifest manner, to be the execrable liar that you habitually are.
A pox upon you, arsehole.
How would you know what a 10th grader should know, you probably never got past the second.
And I didn't think that I was going to get any good news tonight.
That is actually very far from the truth, as was actualized in Nazi political philosophy with disastrous results for everybody else.
Hitler's Nationalism emphasized supreme loyalty to the nation and the race, what we'd call patriotism,
It was much more than simple patriotism. Hitler's vision was a German state of the German Volk embodied in the German Fuehrer. The Volk were the German state by way of composition and their leader, and the state in turn controlled the industry for all practical purposes. Therefore the definition of socialism was met. Contrary to being at odds with socialism, it was the very nationalist element of the Volk that permitted its theoretical achievement to the Nazis.
The Leftist side of the equation was more or less dropped after the 1934 Night of the Long Knives
In political organization as far as marxist-oriented subgroups it was, but not philosophically. Beyond 1934 the Volk concept became integrated with the concept of the Nazi government. The state was said to be a German community of the arian peoples, composed out of those peoples who were said to be symbiotically duty bound to the state and Fuehrer. Throughout the war effort Germans were expected to participate in their communal duties to the state of Germany, which in turn was said to be the Volk. They were expected to work in munitions plant, join the Nazi boy scouts, send their children off to service in the military, and even breed for the future of the German Volk state - truly a very bizarre and apalling system. It was highly oriented around a communal duty embodied and reached through extreme nationalism.
Certainly by the start of the Second World War, Hitler's Nazism was all Nationalism and no Socialism.
Nonsense. By the time the war rolled around, the communal element was pervasive in Nazi society. That there weren't a bunch of socialist political parties and organizations running around in no way precludes the presence of socialism inside the Nazi system. Hitler simply got rid of his competitors in the other marxist parties and later the competitor factions for control of his own party. The remainder (i.e. the Hitler loyalists) were themselves every bit the national socialists of their movement's theoretical background, only they had found the political loyalty that ended up on top. Joe Goebbels is the classic example - a thoroughly marxian-influenced national socialist who found an alliance with Hitler and rode it to the point that he was named the last head of the Nazi state following Hitler's suicide.
And the fact that Lincoln blockaded the late-joining border states, itself an act of war, before they even voted to join gave many of them good cause to do so.
Yep, Walt's a real Blame America Firster with a heavy tilt to the far left. That's the funny thing about it.
Just as Walt's statements about the civil war are interchangable with those by Karl Marx on the same subject, his statements about the Gulf War and 9/11 are virtually indistinguishable with comments on the same subject from the likes of Noam Chomsky, The Nation magazine, Democrats.com, Barbara Lee, Cynthia McKinney and any other given left wing wacko extremist out there on the anti-war picket lines holding banners about the mohammedan "victims" of American "intolerance."
Why they permit filth such as Walt to continue to post here is beyond me, as I firmly believe that not a one of us, not even a yankee, could get away with some of the left wing bullsh!t he's peddled here for the last three years. His comments today have been especially kooky.
"All these deaths of U.S. citizens --the death of EVERY U.S. citizen killed by Arab terror in the United States, can be laid directly at the feet of George Bush I." - Walt, 11/15/02
Source: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/786927/posts?page=452#448
"I'll say again that based on what I knew in 1992, I would vote for Bill Clinton ten times out of ten before I would vote for George Bush Sr." - Walt, 11/15/02
SOURCE: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/786927/posts?q=1&&page=401#420
"As you doubtless know, the separation of powers in that Pact with the Devil we call our Constitution, gives only Congress the right to raise and spend money." - Walt, 11/15/02
SOURCE: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/786927/posts?page=432#432
"Nationalism and socialism are opposites." - Walt, 11/15/02
SOURCE: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/786927/posts?page=570#516
"First of all, the AJC [Atlanta Journal-Constitution] is -not- an "ultra-leftist" newspaper, and you know it." - Walt, 11/13/02
SOURCE: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/784464/posts?page=70#70
"The Reagan administration acted in secret to pervert the Constitution...I feel that admiration for Reagan has rightly diminished over time, and rightly so." - Walt, 11/15/02
SOURCE: I feel that admiration for Reagan has rightly diminished over time, and rightly so.
Think about all that and think about Walt said. It summarizes nicely into the following:
1. He blamed George H. W. Bush and America for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, not the actual terrorists themselves.
2. He proudly announced his devoted support for Bill Clinton.
3. He dismissed the United States Constitution as an essentially worthless pact with the devil.
4. He asserted the non-existant incompatability of socialism with nationalism in an attempt to absolve the left of its role in Nazi Germany.
5. He defended one of the most notoriously left wing newspapers in the country from charges of its liberal bias.
6. He blasted the Reagan administration with charges of corruption while simultaneously giving Clinton a pass, and then expressed hopes that Reagan's stature would diminish with history.
Now tell me. Tell me the name of any freeper other than Walt who could get away with flooding this message board with any ONE of those things without some sort of warning if not banning for being a liberal disrupter. I venture to speculate they are few and far between. As with all liberal Democrats though, the rules simply don't seem to apply with Walt.
"All these deaths of U.S. citizens --the death of EVERY U.S. citizen killed by Arab terror in the United States, can be laid directly at the feet of George Bush I." - Walt, 11/15/02
Source: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/786927/posts?page=452#448
"I'll say again that based on what I knew in 1992, I would vote for Bill Clinton ten times out of ten before I would vote for George Bush Sr." - Walt, 11/15/02
SOURCE: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/786927/posts?q=1&&page=401#420
"As you doubtless know, the separation of powers in that Pact with the Devil we call our Constitution, gives only Congress the right to raise and spend money." - Walt, 11/15/02
SOURCE: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/786927/posts?page=432#432
"Nationalism and socialism are opposites." - Walt, 11/15/02
SOURCE: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/786927/posts?page=570#516
"First of all, the AJC [Atlanta Journal-Constitution] is -not- an "ultra-leftist" newspaper, and you know it." - Walt, 11/13/02
SOURCE: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/784464/posts?page=70#70
"The Reagan administration acted in secret to pervert the Constitution...I feel that admiration for Reagan has rightly diminished over time, and rightly so." - Walt, 11/15/02
SOURCE: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/786927/posts?page=432#432
Think about all that and think about Walt said. It summarizes nicely into the following:
1. He blamed George H. W. Bush and America for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, not the actual terrorists themselves.
2. He proudly announced his devoted support for Bill Clinton.
3. He dismissed the United States Constitution as an essentially worthless pact with the devil.
4. He asserted the non-existant incompatability of socialism with nationalism in an attempt to absolve the left of its role in Nazi Germany.
5. He defended one of the most notoriously left wing newspapers in the country from charges of its liberal bias.
6. He blasted the Reagan administration with charges of corruption while simultaneously giving Clinton a pass, and then expressed hopes that Reagan's stature would diminish with history.
Now tell me. Tell me the name of any freeper other than Walt who could get away with flooding this message board with any ONE of those things without some sort of warning if not banning for being a liberal disrupter. I venture to speculate they are few and far between. As with all liberal Democrats though, the rules simply don't seem to apply with Walt.
What in the world are you talking about? Economic Inquiry is the OUP's journal for economics. I haven't heard of any reason to question it's reputation, and its been around for 40 years now. It seems to me that you are attempting to discredit an article you have not read in a publication you know little about by calling it names, and all because you don't want to hear what the article concludes.
That sounds about right. Same as when some rebel colonies seceded from the British Empire 85 years earlier and got themselves a war.
Lincoln's executive order was issued two days after Virginia seceded and only mentions the states which had already joined the Confederacy. Nor would Tennessee or Arkansas be affected by a naval blockade. How the blockade was enforced is another matter, but if there were property seizures and fighting already going on, one could understand why the navy might also apply it to Virginia or North Carolina. After Sumter it was clear to all that states that voted for secession had cast their lot with the Confederacy, so the blockade might have been extended to them. But I've seen no evidence for this. The news that the Confederate states were to be blockaded had an effect on opinion in the Upper South. But all the evidence I've seen is that the blockade that Lincoln declared extended from Texas to South Carolina, and did not include Virginia or North Carolina.
Virginia's secession did not occur until the referendum, which if I recall correctly, was after the blockade. I'll have to pull the documents, but if my memory serves me, there was an order and an extension following that order that included some non-seceded states.
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