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Evidence Builds for DeLorenzo's Lincoln
October 16, 2002 | Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

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


TOPICS: Miscellaneous
KEYWORDS: dixielist
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To: Aurelius
it would be DIFFICULT for walt to appear more absurd than he usually does!

free dixie,sw

761 posted on 11/18/2002 8:35:30 AM PST by stand watie
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To: Dutch-Comfort
do you have ANY idea how dumb this post makes you look?

free dixie,sw

762 posted on 11/18/2002 8:36:54 AM PST by stand watie
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To: Jael; WhiskeyPapa
I've never seen that research. Could you source that or did you look in the census yourself?

Ooops. Bad html. Try this

Go to 1860 Census

763 posted on 11/18/2002 8:37:22 AM PST by Ditto
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To: GOPcapitalist
EXACTLY!

free dixie,sw

764 posted on 11/18/2002 8:40:07 AM PST by stand watie
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Comment #765 Removed by Moderator

To: Dutch-Comfort
you are living in a dream world.

if you HAVE such facts, post them.

free dixie,sw

766 posted on 11/18/2002 8:41:30 AM PST by stand watie
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To: GOPcapitalist
VERY TRUE!

free dixie,sw

767 posted on 11/18/2002 8:44:07 AM PST by stand watie
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To: Jael
"No, idle poor whites were the plague of the south"

That can't be possible. If you didn't work you didn't eat if you were white.

Well, poor whites could eat poorly.

"Olmstead was in fact deeply depressed by the squalor, ignorance, and social degredation which he found in large parts of the South. The great mass of Southern whites he described as ill-clothed, ill-fed, and uneducated. Talking to everyone as he jogged along the roads and put up at night at farmhouses, he found that most common people did not know the elementary facts of geography: they thought Virginia south of Carolina, and Indiana somewhere between Georgia and Texas; they believed New York, then a city of seven hundred thousand, a town in which Olmsted must know everybody and see southern visitor; they talked in 1856 of the recent annexation of Nebrasky, which they thought as large as the original thirteen states. Many of them read nothing and knew nothing outside outside the affairs of their locality.

He found their tables spread with coarse, ill-cooked food. He travelled almost the length of the South without finding a farmhouse which boasted of two sheets on a bed...The scattered homes of the large planters bespoke prosperity, and sometimes elegance; but the great majority of Southerners dwelt upon a level of poverty. Indeed, he declares in A Journey in the Back Country that he honestly believes that the average free negro in New York or New England lived in greater comfort than the average white man of the lower South...[Olmsted] was distressed by their ignorance, indigence, and helplesness. Intelligent representatives of the underpriviledged whites voluntarily told him that slavery laid a heavy incubus upon their folk. The sand-hillers of South Carolina, gaunt, cadaverous and listless, living in shanties on rice and milk, their women sometimes working on hand looms for sixteen cents a day; small subsistance-farmers on the Congaree superstititous and idle, their dress the coarsest cloth, their sustenance a porridge of cow-peas; the illiterate folk of the frontier regions of Louisiana and Arkansas, the wretched starvelings and wild men of the pine woods in Georgia, the backward hillbillies of north Alabama -- these were all victims of slavery. He noted that white artisans were constantly made to feel to feel themselves engaged in a degrading competition with slave labor. He commented upon the lack of educational facilities for the poor in most slave areas--holding communities."

-- from "The Emergence of Lincoln Vol. 1" p. 207-210 by Allan Nevins

Walt

768 posted on 11/18/2002 8:48:50 AM PST by WhiskeyPapa
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To: Ditto
lincoln, that GREAT BLOODSPILLER, tyrant & war criminal, was ONLY on HIS own side. PERSONAL POWER & $$$$$$$ were the totality of his want/needs. he was/is wee willie klintoon's twin, seperated by 150 years;a cheap politician, nothing more,nothing less.

if it had been in HIS best interest, he would have announced for secession.

free dixie,sw

769 posted on 11/18/2002 8:52:40 AM PST by stand watie
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Comment #770 Removed by Moderator

To: WhiskeyPapa
All, victims of slavery.

"The poor you have with you always." ~Jesus.
771 posted on 11/18/2002 8:59:27 AM PST by Jael
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To: yankhater
as i said earlier on this thread:

chattal slavery caused the WBTS in precisely the same way that FISH cause FLOODS!

please tell me why southrons "must accept" a LIE.

free dixie,sw

772 posted on 11/18/2002 9:03:00 AM PST by stand watie
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To: Jael; Dutch-Comfort
That can't be possible. If you didn't work you didn't eat if you were white.

From Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America

Another very remarkable thing is Ohio is this: Ohio is perhaps the State of the Union in which it is easiest to see, in a striking way and close up, the effects of slavery and of liberty on the social state of a people. The State of Ohio is separated from Kentucky just by one river; on either side of it the soil is equally fertile, and the situation equally favorable, and yet everything is different.

Here a population devoured by feverish activity, trying every means to make its fortune; the population seems poor to look at, for they work with their hands, but that work is the source of riches. There is a people which makes others work for it and shows little compassion, a people without energy, mettle or the spirit of enterprise. On one side of the stream, work is honored and leads to all else, on the other it is despised as the mark of servitude. Those who are forced to work to live cross over into Ohio where they can make money without disgrace.

The population of Kentucky, which has been peopled for nearly a century, grows slowly. Ohio only joined the Confederation thirty years ago and has a million inhabitants. Within those thirty years Ohio has become the entrepot for the wealth that goes up and down the Mississippi; it has opened two canals and joined the Gulf of Mexico to the North Coast; meanwhile Kentucky, older and perhaps better placed, stood still.

These differences cannot be attributed to any other cause but slavery. It degrades the black population and enervates the white. Its fatal effects are recognized, and yet it is preserved and will be preserved for a long time more. Slavery threatens the future of those who maintain it, and it ruins the State; but it has become part of the habits and prejudices of the colonist, and his immediate interest is at war with the interest of his own future and the even stronger interest of the country.

So nothing shows more clearly than the comparison I have just made that human prosperity depends much more on the institutions and the will of man than on the external circumstances that surround him. Man is not made for slavery; that truth is perhaps even better proved by the master than by the slave.

(Tocqueville, p. 285)


773 posted on 11/18/2002 9:04:38 AM PST by Ditto
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To: stand watie
Can you show some documentation for your rant, or do you only post rants.
774 posted on 11/18/2002 9:08:41 AM PST by Ditto
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To: Ditto
go read lincoln's PRIVATE correspondence. that's all the proof you or anyone else will need.

especially check out lincoln's rants against jews,roman catholics,indians,blacks,latinos & "muddy colured people". he was a stone racist, of the very worst sort.

he was NOT a nice man.

free dixie,sw

775 posted on 11/18/2002 9:15:01 AM PST by stand watie
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To: stand watie
especially check out lincoln's rants against jews,roman catholics,indians,blacks,latinos & "muddy colured people". he was a stone racist, of the very worst sort.

Why don't you give us a link to them?

776 posted on 11/18/2002 9:19:50 AM PST by Ditto
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To: Ditto
once again-(SIGH) there are NO LINKS to anti-lincoln information AND no REAL research of any other historical sort can be found by surfing the worldwidewierd.

there are no shortcuts to knowledge. you sound like most of my lazy students;they want me to "spoonfeed" them easily found data,which takes little or no effort to find on a search engine.

that is NOT how you or anyone else learns. TRUTH about history is ONLY found in libraries, in dusty tomes. it requires effort.

turn off your computer, go to the library and READ something origional;you just might learn something.

free dixie,sw

777 posted on 11/18/2002 9:38:39 AM PST by stand watie
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To: stand watie
OK, post the title, author, copywrite, etc. of the book you are referencing then. Or if not a book then post some source that people can check. Somewhere, anywhere, that Lincoln referred to anyone as 'muddy colored people'. Are you sure you're not thinking of Jeff Davis?
778 posted on 11/18/2002 9:46:35 AM PST by Non-Sequitur
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To: stand watie
So in other words, you have no documentation for your rants.
779 posted on 11/18/2002 10:13:16 AM PST by Ditto
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To: Ditto
certainly none that N-S, walt,x and you would accept.

your minds are CLOSED.

free dixie,sw

780 posted on 11/18/2002 10:16:14 AM PST by stand watie
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