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
Oh, indeed you did read it right.
It's further proof that these fiiiine Southern gentlemen are possessed of impeccable manners, rapier wit, and a thorough grasp of facts. They have scaled unheard-of heights in the art of argumentation. And yet they still cannot seem to get it through their thick skulls that their confederate heroes were fighting for the right to continue holding human beings in slavery.
(Your surprise, BTW, is proof that you haven't been around too many of these threads. You're now on notice that these guys toss around insults almost as freely as the libertarians do.)
Your argument, insofar as you have one, seems based on the premise that Southern rebels acted rationally. The sad fact is that humans don't always behave rationally, as is admirably reflected by your bizarre and transcendent hatred for the United States. The Southern armies were fighting in the interests of the great planters, speculators, and slave merchants, not for themselves or for any coherent rational reason.
I don't have a doctorate. I hold an M.A. in Computer Information Science from the University of Dallas. Not bad for a "teenager" to hold a Masters, eh nitwit?
I'll rewrite your stupid butt with an extremely small shell script.
No mercy.
Coming soon: Tha SYNDICATE.
101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that Internet Explorer cannot.
Since you seem so interested in the academic credentials of others, maybe you could let us know where you received your law degree.
Right. But it was okay, though, since it was in the name of freedom.
You're now on notice that these guys toss around insults almost as freely as the libertarians do.
Say no more. Now I know that I'm notice if this is true.
No mercy.
Coming soon: Tha SYNDICATE.
101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that Internet Explorer cannot.
Nobody is hunting me with dogs.
Walt
another of the "poison ivy league".
yes, i favor freedom for the south. and NO, all the damnyankee, self-serving lies of the imperialist,arrogant,hatefilled, anti-semitic left of the DIMocRAT, socialists of the NE will change my belief in FREEDOM.
to quote Professor Tyrone S. Brown of Dillard University, "the hateful imperialists of the northeast NEVER cared a damn about anyone except themselves, money and power- least of all about the plight of the slaves. you could not have found 10,000 people in the whole nation in 1860 who favored manumission of the slaves. almost nobody, north or south, would have been willing to fight a major war to free them".
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
That's what I thought too. But then the Federal Government raped my wife in front of me, sold my infant children to various owners hundreds of miles away, whipped my back raw, and forced me to spend the rest of my life picking cotton in the fields for non-payment of taxes.
I'm still waiting for someone to force a comparison between taxation and the Jewish Holocaust. It will happen, if it hasn't already.
free dixie,sw
Per the 1860 census, there were only 64 slaves in the free states.
According to the US Census of 1860, there were only 64 slaves in all of the "Free" States and Territories in that year: 29 in Utah Territory, 15 in Nebraska Territory, 2 in Kansas Territory, and 18 in New Jersey.
You should be ashamed.
Walt
i have NO hatred for the USA. ask around FR, you'll find i've spent my time on the "freep line". that said, i DO favor FREEDOM for dixie, as many southron freepers do.
foree dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
Now what?
Or at least for the 60-odd percent of dixie that were white.
This is just a flat lie. You've seen the real data many times.
From Jim Epperson's website:
J.E.B. DeBow was the publisher/editor of DeBow's Review, a leading antebellum monthly magazine, published in New Orleans. DeBow was a committed pro-slavery Southerner who felt that the North was oppressing the South. He also, contrary to the beliefs of most white Southerners, passionately wanted the South to move away from agriculture and develop an industrial base. He was fascinated by numbers and had served as director of the 1850 United States census and had argued that the collection and distribution of statistics was an important task which required a professional staff, serving not just every ten years but all the time.
DeBow was concerned about the claims of people like Helper that the average Southerner, being a non-slaveholder, had no stake in the success of the Confederacy. It is an interesting turn around from those late twentieth century Confederate supporters who argue that the Peculiar Institution had nothing to do with the Civil War.
DeBow disagreed with that philosophy and the January 1861 issue of the Review carried an article by him refuting the claims that the average Southerner did not have a stake in the survival and expansion of slavery. Reprinted below is his analysis of the 1850 census and what it showed about the actual percentages of Southerners who were part of slave holding families, not just the more limited numbers counting only the actual (usually the senior male member) owner.
"[The] non-slaveholding class ... were even more deeply interested than any other in the maintenance of our institutions, and in the success of the movement now inaugurated for the entire social, industrial, and political independence of the South. …
When in charge of the national census office, several years since, I found that it had been stated by an abolition senator from his seat, that the number of slaveholders at the South did not exceed 150,000. Convinced that, it was a gross misrepresentation of facts, I caused a careful examination of the returns to be made, which fixed the actual number at 347,255, and communicated the information, by note, to Senator Cass, who read it in the Senate. I first called attention to the fact that the number embraced slaveholding families, and that to arrive at the actual number of slaveholders, it would be necessary to multiply by the proportion of persons which the census showed to a family. When this was done, the number was swelled to about two millions.
Since these results were made public, I have had reason to think that the separation of the schedules of the slave and the free was calculated to lead to omissions of the single properties, and that on this account, it would be safe to put the number of families at 375,000, and the number of actual slaveholders at about two millions and a quarter.
Assuming the published returns, however, to be correct, it will appear that one half of the population of South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana, excluding the cities, are slaveholders, and that one third of the population of the entire South are similarly circumstanced. The average number of slaves is nine to each slaveholding family, and one half of the whole number of such holders are in possession of less than five slaves.
It will thus appear that the slaveholders of the South, so far from constituting, numerically, an insignificant portion of its people, as has been malignantly alleged, make up an aggregate greater in relative proportion than the holders of any other species of property whatever, in any part of the world; and that of no other property can it be said, with equal truthfulness, that it is an interest of the whole community. While every other family in the States I have specially referred to are slaveholders, but one family in every three and a half families in Maine, New-Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, are holders of agricultural land; and in European states the proportion is almost indefinitely less. The proportion which the slaveholders of the South bear to the entire population is greater than that of the owners of land or houses, agricultural stock, State, bank, or other corporation securities anywhere else. No political economist will deny this. Nor is that all. Even in the States which are among the largest slaveholding, South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee, the land proprietors outnumber nearly two to one, in relative proportion, the owners of the same property in Maine, Massachusetts, and Connecticut; and if the average number of slaves held by each family throughout the South be but nine, and if one half of the whole number of slaveholders own under five slaves, it will be seen how preposterous is the allegation of our enemies, that the slaveholding class is an organized wealthy aristocracy. The poor men of the South are the holders of one to five slaves, and it would be equally consistent with truth and justice to say that they represent, in reality, its slaveholding interest.
The fact being conceded, that there is a very large class of persons in the slaveholding States who have no direct ownership in slaves, it may be well asked, upon what principle a greater antagonism can be presumed between them and their fellow-citizens, than exists among the larger class of non-landholders in the free States and the landed interests there? If a conflict of interest exists in one instance, it does in the other; and if patriotism and public spirit are to be measured upon so low a standard, the social fabric at the North is in far greater danger of dissolution than it is here.
Though I protest against the false and degrading standard to which Northern orators and statesmen have reduced the measure of patriotism, which is to be expected from a free and enlightened people, and in the name of the non-slaveholders of the South, fling back the insolent charge that they are only bound to their country by the consideration of its "loaves and fishes," and would be found derelict in honor and principle, and public virtue, in proportion as they were needy in circumstances, I think it but easy to show that the interest of the poorest non-slaveholder among us is to make common cause with, and die in the last trenches, in defence of the slave property of his more favored neighbor.
The non-slaveholders of the South may be classed as either such as desire and are incapable of purchasing slaves, or such as have the means to purchase and do not, because of the absence of the motive-preferring to hire or employ cheaper white labor. A class conscientiously objecting to the ownership of slave property does not exist at the South: for all such scruples have long since been silenced by the profound and unanswerable arguments to which Yankee controversy has driven our statesmen, popular orators, and clergy. Upon the sure testimony of God's Holy Book, and upon the principles of universal polity, they have defended and justified the institution! The exceptions, which embrace recent importations in Virginia, and in some of the Southern cities, from the free States of the North, and some of the crazy, socialistic Germans in Texas, are too unimportant to affect the truth of the proposition."
Walt
at least you show some evidence of academic excellence, unlike some here! and your writing style is literate. frankly i enjoy " crossing swords" with you.
free dixie NOW,sw
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