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
To the contrary. I already directed your attention to a fairly prominent historian you yourself brought up. Look at Richard Hofstadter's chapter on The Lincoln. He discusses Fitzhugh with that conclusion.
I'm saying in its purest form that Socialism is international in nature and that it posits the brotherhood of all workers. Hitler didn't care a fig about that. The international nature of pure socialism would by definition, preclude nationalism.
I'm not saying that you can't apply socialist principals to national units. I'm sorry if I gave any other impression.
Walt
The order that Davis gave to fire on Sumter started the war, just as Davis had known it would do. For his own reasons he preferred war to negotiation.
No, he didn't.
Walt
A proliferation of journal reading is no excuse for randomly calling various journals certain names and dismissing articles you have not read within them by the same means. That is what you did in your first response to this thread. Got it, "Dude"?
I still don't think Ec. Inquriy is top tier, and gave reasons for that;
Beyond first calling it names and then stating on your own authority that it was not top tier, no. Not really.
I also cited many top tier journals
You stated two, again on your own subjective judgment of authority, in your initial post on this thread.
(far from "shooting my mouth off")
No, not very far at all. More like the definition of shooting one's mouth off.
and have, unlike you, actually done research on and published on Lincoln.
Seeing as you know practically nothing about me or my own background, you are wholly unqualified to assert what I have and have not done in the past. It shows in the error of your statement.
You would know, for example, that Marx contradicted himself incessantly to prove whatever point he wanted to make
Such is typically the nature of any political theory that emerges out of a modernist jumble of nonsense and proceeds to breed with a postmodernist mush of relativism. If you look to marxism expecting anything differently you will walk away dissappointed...or perhaps delusional.
But what Marx thought of Lincoln is irrelevant.
No, to the consideration of history it is perfectly relevant. That you don't like the existence of what he said is no grounds to pretend it's not there, which is essentially what you just informed me about your intentions.
There is no serious scholar of whom I'm aware that sees anything "socialist" in the writings of Lincoln
Yet on the same note comparatively little due consideration has been given to Lincoln's economic theories where his labor theory of value ideas are most prominent. For the record, in no way do I hold that Lincoln himself was some sort of secret communist, but only that he shared in a fundamental economic theory with them known as the labor theory of value. That he does this is a matter of fact and one that I pointed out with documentation. It seems though that it is also one you do not wish to know, hear about, or discuss, therefore you pretend it is not there or not "relevant" in hopes of making it go away.
One could just as easily say that the decision for war had been made by Lincoln in December 1860 or February 1861 when he directed Winfield Scott and other military officials to make preparations for retaking the southern forts. That does not change the fact though of who fired the shot initiating the physical hostilities, that being the Harriet Lane.
The universally accepted textbook definition of pure socialism - "control of the means of production by the people" - says absolutely nothing of an "international nature," Walt.
Even then, nationalism does NOT preclude an international nature IF a national state asserts itself into international dominance. If a certain socialist state or alliance around that state is all that there is globally, nationalism to that state is itself one and the same with a profession of globalism.
Hitler was not bent on world domination.
Like most people, I haven't read "Mein Kampf". But I understand it was his position that the Germans deserved the lebensraum that the slavs occupied. Since the slavs were subhuman, they could be exterminated or relegated to servant class. Hitler's ambition was limited to securing lebensraum for the German people.
Hitler hated the French because of WWI, but they were an inconvenience. He was really surprised to crush them so easily, but all that did was make it that much easier to turn to the East. He wanted a peace with the British in 1940; The Brits weren't buying. That much is pretty well known-- it doesn't square with Hitler having plans for worldwide dominion in 1940 at least.
You are --surely-- familiar with Hitler's order to his U-boats to avoid contact with U.S. ships. How does that square with plans for worldwide dominiation?
He was pretty annoyed with the Japs for attacking Pearl Harbor. His intuition told him to declare war on us. Ooops.
After he invaded Russia, he soon realized he had a full plate. If he ever considered world wide domination, it was between late 1940 and the fall of 1941 when he was stalled in front of Moscow.
Walt
There is significantly more to it than that, Walt.
Hitler desired the slavic regions, but he also desired other things. He sought the unification of Germanic peoples for example and sought this by expansion. He also desired, and sought with his ally Mussolini, a mediterranian conquest. The expansion possibilities beyond that were likely and are anyone's guess.
Evidence of the expansionism comes from a major plank of German national socialism's beliefs. Hitler and the Nazis believed themselves and Germany to be the embodiment of superiority in the world - in science, in technology, in ethnicity, in practically everything. The concept came out of the philosophical writings of German marxists during world war I. The nazis saw as almost a destiny the emergence and dominence of "Mitteleuropa" - the middle-lands of Europe, or the German states. They wrote on end about how the "Haendler," or merchants, were in a societal competition/clash with the "Helden," the heroes. Germany was to them, of course, the state of heroes in the world that was destined to win and owed the leadership of the world. It was a truly bizarre train of thought and one firmly rooted in marxist philosophy with a strong hegelian influence.
since i AM one of those "muddy coloured people",i.e. a "half-breed", the quote "stuck firmly in my head".
sorry, that was a 1/3 of a century ago. nonetheless, he was a HATER/RACIST & not a "nice guy".
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
LOL! A card, you are! The ironies in this thread are killing me.
For the nation? I don't know. It sure did change a lot of things. Since we don't know the alternative, it is hard to say if we would have been better off if the war had never happened. If we want to project backwards, I'd go back to 1787 and do what the vast majority at the Constitutional Convention wanted to do --- insert a clause that would have ended slavery. We may have started as a nation of only 10 or 12 states, but that would have been the best re-write of history I can imagine. But going forward to 1861, I do know that Union victory was the best thing that ever happened to the south. If the Confederacy had "succeeded", it would have spiraled down into a banana republic. The slaveocracy had virtually turned their back on the modern world. The south nearly missed the industrial revolution just as Latin America missed it because the sources of wealth were devoted to land ownership and agriculture pursuits and there was no desire or even respect for private enterprise or industry. It and labor were looked down on by the controlling society. (White Trash) Even a rabid pro-Confederate capitalist like DeBeau couldn't get the slaveocracy to invest in industry.
Those questions are all academic however. Even if a wussy Buchanan-type administration had remained in power in Washington and the south had been able to pull off a peaceful secession, war would have came eventually. There were too many opportunities for conflict to hold any hope that war could be avoided for long.
Are some of us wrong to say that a lot of the lack of respect for the Constitutuion, the current moral and intellectual plight of the Blacks in the US, and the out-of-control nature of the Federal government can be traced back to this conflict and its outcome?
When I look at the post civil war Jim Crow laws that existed all the way up through the 1970s, completely ignoring the Bill of Rights, respect for the Constitution is not what comes to my mind. States Rights is a valid and powerful tool left to us by our Founders. Unfortunately, it has been so damaged by using it first as an ex post facto justification for armed rebellion and afterward as a tool to deny Constitutional rights to a class of citizens. For nearly a century and a half, the states rights doctrine was abused by the southern states. The challenge for we conservatives today is to return the states rights doctrine to its rightful place and convince people that it is not code for discrimination. It is an uphill battle.
But surely such complexity in the documents of the time can't lead us to the story the public indoctrination camps tried to teach us when I was a kid that the North was a bunch of abolitionists who were motivated by a deep compassion for the slaves, and the South were a bunch of Nazi-style racists and drunks ready for a fight, because they knew in their hearts that being mean to Blacks (which is what they lived for) was wrong.
I don't know where you went to school, but my experience is very different. I was in elementary and high school through the 50s and early 60s in both parochial and public schools. On civil war studies, we were given what I would consider a homogenized, politically correct "nationalized' version of the war with a lot of emphasis on tariffs, states-rights and other "sectional differences" with slavery being just one of them. As I later discovered, that interpretation began early in the 20th century as an effort to placate the south and promote national unity. It was itself a re-write of history. In college, I only took one American History class, and the instructor was so deadly dull, I slept through most of it. I have zero recollection of what if any spin he put on the issue. I pretty much carried that milk-toast "somehow tariffs and states rights caused it" theory for many years until I began to educate myself on the issues. Once I did, I understood that slavery, or more precisely, the expansion of slavery, was the cause of the war.
It is not that there were no other aggravating issues, but all of those other issues combined would not have led to secession, while the expansion issue alone was more than sufficient to cause secession and war. And contrary to what many say about expansion, the south's concern was not that more free states would have lead the north to dominate them in congress. Unlike the founding era where the nation's interests were clearly divided "north and south", by 1860, there was North, South, East, West, and lots of areas that could at any time be more than one of those orientations. Just like today, multiple coalitions of interests were available to the south to force compromise on tariffs or on any other issue. Some said that a free state dominated congress would end slavery. Looking at the math of passing a constitutional amendment ending slavery also makes that argument silly. Even to this day, if 15 states wanted slavery, there are not enough other states to pass a constitutional amendment ending slavery. Those arguments were and remain smoke screens.
The only issue that mattered was expansion. Expansion of slavery was vital to the southern slavepowers for both economic and social reasons. In the 70 years between the 1st census of 1790 and the 1860 census, the number of slaves had quadrupled, from less than 800,000 to nearly 4 million. For the first 30 or so years of our nationhood, slavery was becoming less and less of a profitable enterprise with all of the Northern states ending it by the 1820s. Many in the Upper South freed their slaves and there were serious abolition movements throughout the south that had a lot of support. That all changed with the advent of King Cotton. Slavery suddenly became fabulously profitable for those who could amass a large enough cotton plantation and afford enough slaves. Even the poor, burned-out plantations of the Upper South benefited by basically becoming breeding stables to supply the ever-expanding demand for slaves in the Cotton Belt.
It was a great deal as long as new markets for slaves continued to be opened as they were in the Gulf States and Texas. But by 1860, the Cotton Belt was nearing its geographical limits. By that time, slaves made up over 1/3 of all the population of the entire south and 40-50% of the population of the Deep South while white population grew slowly or not at all. Those 4 million slaves represented over 60% of the privately held wealth of the south. If new outlets were not found for slaves, not only would whites in the south soon be hopelessly (and dangerously) outnumbered by slaves, but the value of those slaves would rapidly fall as supply outstripped demand.
In a nutshell, that is why a wealthy planter in Charleston was willing to go to war over the question of slavery in Nebraska or Colorado. Economically and socially, he had no other option. Their wealth, power, and even safety, depended on finding new markets for slaves, and Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans stood directly in their path.
Lincoln was a socialist, a soul-brother of Karl Marx, based on your "extensive" reading of him.
The Civil War was the result of a tax that affected a tiny part of the southern economy, rather than slavery, which obviously affected no aspect of southern life.
Economic Inquiry is a top flight journal. (I'll remind the search committee of that that the next time we have a candidate who has published in EI, but not JEH or AHR. I'm sure they'll agree, because, hey, you said so.)
And I shoot my mouth off because I've published in the field and you apparently haven't. Dang that first hand experience.
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