Posted on 02/12/2011 6:06:39 AM PST by Notary Sojac
I know precisely what you mean.
The opposition challenged us to raise the discourse, a la rustbucket.
I thought, alright, I’m willing to give it a try. Now, lets see if they were sincere.
I thought, alright, I’m willing to give it a try. Now, lets see if they were sincere.
Maybe you haven't noticed, but some of us have been engaging Rustbucket in a mutually respectful way for some time now. If you want to join in, you're more than welcome.
You'll have to pardon some of us if your new-found and loudly proclaimed commitment to civility hasn't yet convinced us of your sincerity. Especially since you've done little else BUT proclaim it.
Although your post seems to delve only into trivialities, I will honor your effort by pointing out that you had a math error.
In the name of accuracy, you might do a better count of effort by looking at words.
Mr. ‘x’ exerted an effort of 70 lines while I used 38.
And since his energy level was more enthusiastic....well, case made.
Perhaps in some way my quote of Lincoln seems dishonest to you, but in fact is an error on your part. I quoted from his sixth debate with Steven A. Douglas at Quincy, Ill., Oct. 13, 1858.
Your quote was from his first debate with Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858.
If you reread both, then come back and describe the distortion, if it still exists in your mind.
From the 6th Debate at Quincey
-----------------------------------------------------------
As this was done in the Judge’s opening speech at Galesburgh, I had an opportunity, as I had the middle speech then, of saying something in answer to it. He brought forward a quotation or two from a speech of mine, delivered at Chicago, and then to contrast with it, he brought forward an extract from a speech of mine at Charleston, in which he insisted that I was greatly inconsistent, and insisted that his conclusion followed that I was playing a double part, and speaking in one region one way, and in another region another way. I have not time now to dwell on this as long as I would like, and wish only now to requote that portion of my speech at Charleston, which the Judge quoted, and then make some comments upon it. This he quotes from me as being delivered at Charleston, and I believe correctly: "1 will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which will ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior. I am as much as any other man in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race." ["Good," "Good," and loud cheers.] This, I believe, is the entire quotation from the Charleston speech, as Judge Douglas made it. His comments are as follows:Lincoln in fact repeated the exact same words that we are discussing in the 6th Debate as he used in the 1st Debate.
"Yes, here you find men who hurra for Lincoln, and say he is right when he discards all distinction between races, or when he declares that he discards the doctrine that there is such a thing as a superior and inferior race; and Abolitionists are required and expected to vote for Mr. Lincoln because he goes for the equality of races, holding that in the Declaration of Independence the white man and negro were declared equal, and endowed by divine law with equality. And down south with the old line Whigs, with the Kentuckians, the Virginians, and the Tennesseeans, he tells you that there is a physical difference between the races, making the one superior, the other inferior, and he is in favor of maintaining the superiority of the white race over the negro."
Those are the Judge’s comments. Now I wish to show you, that a month, or, only lacking three days of a month, before I made the speech at Charleston, which the Judge quotes from, he had himself heard me say substantially the same thing. It was in our first meeting, at Ottawa—and I will say a word about where it was, and the atmosphere it was in, after awhile—but at our first meeting, at Ottawa, I read an extract from an old speech of mine, made nearly four years ago, not merely to show my sentiments, but to show that my sentiments were long entertained and openly expressed; in which extract I expressly declared that my own feelings would not admit a social and political equality between the white and black races, and that even if my own feelings would admit of it, I still knew that the public sentiment of the country would not, and that such a thing was an utter impossibility, or substantially that.
That extract from my old speech, the reporters, by some sort of accident, passed over, and it was not reported. I lay no blame upon any body. I suppose they thought that I would hand it over to them, and dropped reporting while I was reading it, but afterward went away without getting it from me. At the end of that quotation from my old speech, which I read at Ottawa, I made the comments which were reported at that time, and which I will now read, and ask you to notice how very nearly they are the same as Judge Douglas says were delivered by me, down in Egypt. After reading I added these words: "Now, gentlemen, I don’t want to read at any great length, but this is the true complexion of all I have ever said in regard to the institution of slavery or the black race, and this is the whole of it; any thing that argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the negro, is but a specious and fantastical arrangement of words by which a man can prove a horse—chestnut to be a chestnut horse. I will say here, while upon this subject, that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution in the States where it exists. I believe I have no right to do so. I have no inclination to do so. I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together on the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position." [Cheers, "That’s the doctrine."] "I have never said any thing to the contrary, but I hold that notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence—the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas that he is not my equal in many respects, certainly not in color—perhaps not in intellectual and moral endowments; but in the right to eat the bread without the leave of any body else which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every other man." [Loud cheers.]----------------------------------------------------------
LOL, you polished that pot but it still looks just like a kettle. I nominate that as the most inane post of the thread.
Congrats!
Reread both, then come back and describe the distortion, if it still exists in your mind.
The data always leads the way for confused minds.
“You only have to get a copy of Gabor Boritt’s Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream to understand where Guelzo is coming from and probably to see the citations for his quotations.”
You allege familiarity yet you use the word ‘probably’ for citation validation.
And that is the point exactly....quoting the quotes of others do not demonstrate that Lincoln manifested anything that Guelzo would have the public believe.
Why don't you post his sources, his secondary sources, and their sources. Then point out specific patterns of Lincoln behavior that manifest the Guelzo contentions. This will completely clear any conflict. If you are willing to spend the time composing multiple rebuttals, you can do a search and post for everyone to see.
Let us see the evidence that Mr Lincoln's actual behavior was affected by the Guelzo factor.
And in your confusion you continue to dig.
I read both. Lincoln repeated the exacts same words at both debates. He did it in the 6th to answer Doglas' charge that he said one thing in front of an audience in Southern IL. and another in Northern IL.
His position was consistent throughout. No, he didn't think blacks were socially or intellectually equal to whites, but he still thought slavery wrong and that blacks were entitled to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (i.e. property)' just as much as whites.
You are the one who posted his quote out of context -- just as Lost Causers and Leftist revisionists have been doing for decades. They both distort his words and historical record to serve their own ends. Neither has any interest in the truth.
You again? You are wasting my time and everyone's space. I referred you to Boritt's book and you're welcome to read or ignore it as you see fit.
There's nothing controversial about Guelzo's article: Lincoln did promote a free labor economy by encouraging industry, and railroad construction, and settlement of the West. Guelzo even gives you the legislation by name. And his actions were a culmination of a long concern with economic development.
Look at Lincoln's early speeches on discoveries and inventions. Read a basic biography to learn about his interest in establishing banks, roads, and canals in his early career. None of that is disputed.
Look at the 1860 speech in New Haven that Guelzo explicitly refers to, at Lincoln's "Annual Address Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, September 30, 1859" on free and slave labor, at his "Speech on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, March 21, 1854," at his 1854 "Fragment on Government." If I could locate these documents in a few minutes, what's stopping you?
Some people attack Lincoln for not being a perfect free marketeer, but Guelzo makes clear that he wasn't a 20th century liberal or socialist, and many of those free traders who win the praise of today's libertarian fanatics had a blind spot about slavery and weren't opposed to the US remaining merely a source of raw materials for foreign industry.
Really there's nothing controversial in what Guelzo says. Whatever he leaves out you can find for yourself. It's not my job to remedy the gaps in your education and I'm not running a tutorial for you. Still less am I interested in arguing with you, given how irrelevant what you brought to the table in your original post was to Guelzo's article.
Maybe you'll find somebody else interested in rewriting the article for you and tutoring you on basic points of Lincoln's biography, but that's not something you have a right to demand of those who respond to you.
Rasing the discourse and being concerned about the appearance of FR to liblurkers goes beyond selective civility.
You'll have to pardon some of us if your new-found and loudly proclaimed commitment to civility hasn't yet convinced us of your sincerity. Especially since you've done little else BUT proclaim it.
It's obvious that you're spoiling for a fight which tells me that you're not really interested in raising the discourse and you're not really concerned about the appearance of FR. Oh well. You'll just have to shadow box because I'm not interested.
Go in a good way.
And yet you keep responding. Admit it, this forced simulacrum of civility is just eating you alive, isn't it?
Maybe if you were to say something other than loudly announce your new-found allegiance to courtesy, we might find something to engage on. Perhaps you have some opinion on Lincoln's economic philosophy that you'd like to state in a constructive, respectful way.
Wow. I just suffered through that entire original article on NRO, and all I can say is that I’ve rarely read, in terms of the main premise asserted by the author, such bunk.
“His embrace of classical-liberal economics was the force that moved all his achievements, from victory in the Civil War to the galaxy of economic policies that emerged from his presidency.”
This statement is by far the most ludicrous statement I’ve ever read in regard to President Lincoln, as it is almost exactly the opposite of the truth, and then he follows this statement up with other absolutely incredible assertions that fly in the face of historical fact and simple logic.
Furthermore, after totally misrepresenting (and therefore redefining the historical meaning of classical-liberal economics to mean its opposite), Guelzo then spends most of his time writing about slavery. Being most generous to Mr. Guelzo, it was President Lincoln’s opposition to the expansion of slavery into the Western territories, and ONLY in his opposition to this, that President Lincoln’s policies resemble anything remotely related to classical-liberal economics. In all other aspects, his policies were the exact opposite of classical-liberal economics.
But let us take a look at Mr. Guelzo’s assertions... point by point.
By far, the most truthful line in the piece is this one.
“Take the American Revolution to its roots, and you will find it to be a revolution against regulation. Britain’s imperial planners were originally interested in the New World for the quick riches it might yield. When their colonizing forays produced no such fortunes, they banned the development of all but a handful of manufactures in the colonies, taxed the colonies’ carrying trade, and labored to convert them into an agricultural resource. The colonists rebelled, and we know with what result.”
What Mr. Guelzo is referring to here, is mercantilism, defined in general by government planning and regulation of the economy in order to engineer desired results. In the 17th-19th centuries, these policies would have been defined as the opposite of classical-liberal economics, which stressed the absence of government planning, regulations, or interventions into the economy... which many refer to as laissez-faire capitalism. Whereas the mercantilist seeks to use government intervention to engineer desired results, the classical-liberal rejects the use of government power to engineer desired results.
And, in the context of America’s colonial history, here is how British mercantilist policies largely manifested themselves, as Mr. Guelzo accurately points out; onerous government regulations and central planning, high taxes - especially in the form of protective tariffs designed to protect certain businesses and industries from competition, and the squashing of free trade. Of course, there were other major components of mercantilism that Mr. Guelzo conveniently didn’t mention, such as corporate welfare and subsidies for industries and businesses in partnership with the government, and government owned or managed central banks with control of the money supply and other monetary policies.
To recap, here’s what mercantilism stood for:
- government regulations and planning of the economy to engineer desired results
- high taxes so that government can raise money to regulate and plan the economy
- protective tariffs (taxes on imports) to insulate domestic industry from foreign competition
- opposition to free trade
- subsidies (corporate welfare) for corporations and businesses favored by the government, which of course will make everyone else who isn’t one of those corporations or businesses given these special government favors less competitive
- government owned or managed central banks controlling the money supply and setting monetary policy
And here’s what classical-liberal economics stood for:
- no government regulations or planning of the economy... instead of the government engineering results, the economy should be free to develop organically on its own path as the aggregate byproduct of each person’s un-coerced economic decisions
- very low and uniformly levied taxes (or better yet no taxes at all) as government doesn’t need to raise much revenue as its not supposed to be regulating or planning the economy in the first place
- very low tariffs (if any at all), as each person should be free to engage in the buying and selling of whatever he wished... un-coerced by government power, and since the government isn’t supposed to be planning the economy in the first place, there is not need to “protect” favored businesses or corporations from competition
- support for free trade
- no wealth redistribution schemes at all, especially in the form of subsidies (corporate welfare) for corporations and businesses favored by the government, as the government is not supposed to be picking the winners and the losers in the free marketplace
- opposition to government owned or managed central banks controlling the money supply and setting monetary policy, as this manipulation is not part of the proper role of government either
As far the classical-liberal position was concerned, it endorsed Thomas Jefferson’s view that the proper role of government was to defend life, liberty, and property from those who would usurp them... and that was it. Anything beyond this which government tried to do, such as engineering desired economic outcomes or steering the direction of the economic development via government policy, was by definition tyranny.
Nonetheless, in spite of the author’s omissions, so far not so bad.
Unfortunately, from this point onward Mr. Guelzo’s piece meanders aimlessly into the realm of bizarro opposite-land.
For example, Mr. Guelzo has the audacity to actually infer that Thomas Jefferson’s broad philosophy, rather than Alexander Hamilton’s, flew in the face of classical-liberal economics.
What could be further from the truth!!! About the only policy that Jefferson supported that did not line up with classical-liberal teachings was his disastrous Embargo Act (born out of a desperate attempt to avoid war with Britain and France). Otherwise, Thomas Jefferson was the archetype of the classical-liberal economist, calling for free trade, minimal taxation and government spending, low tariffs, no government intervention or planning of the economy, opposition to any wealth redistribution schemes that would steer other people’s money into the hands of corporations and businesses in bed with the government, and steadfast opposition to centralized banking schemes and monetary policies.
By comparison, what did Alexander Hamilton stand for? He stood for high protective tariffs on imports, numerous and high taxes to raise money for government, lots of government spending, high tariffs to protect government favored businesses and industries from competition, numerous government interventions in order to steer the economy in the direction of results desirable to the government, numerous subsidies and other corporate welfare schemes (called “internal improvements” when referred to government assistance for transportation projects such as roads, canals, and later on railroad companies) designed to redistribute other people’s money into the hands of businesses and corporations in bed with the government, and the establishment of a national bank giving government the power to control the money supply and conduct monetary policy.
To put it bluntly, a historian could not have invented an agenda more at odds (than Hamilton’s) with classical-liberal economics if he had concocted it in a test tube in a laboratory. What Hamilton was proposing for the United States in the 1790s was nothing less than the replacement of mercantilism imposed by the heavy hand of the British government with mercantilism imposed by the heavy hand of the United States government.
Nonetheless, Guelzo then continues with this gem, as he brings Hamilton’s mercantilist successor, Henry Clay, into the discussion.
“The next round of this dispute was played out by Andrew Jackson, who shared all of Jefferson’s suspicions about commerce and extended them to its twin enablers, banks and corporations, and Henry Clay, who urged the federal government to encourage industrial development through a public-private national bank, direct assistance for building a transportation network (“internal improvements,” as it was called), and protective tariffs to help industrial start-ups compete with established foreign competitors.”
Okay, what was Henry Clay’s agenda again, according to the author of this piece (in his own words no less)?
1) a public-private national bank
2) direct assistance for building a transportation network (”internal improvements,” as it was called)
3) protective tariffs
Again, straight out the mercantilist playbook. Clay’s “American System,” as it was called at the time, just like Hamilton’s agenda, could not have been more at odds with the principles of classical-liberal laissez faire economics if he had tried.
And then, as the author points out himself, who was Henry Clays’ successor in terms of economic policies, who picked up where he left off and became one of the primary supporters of this “American System” - which was the exact opposite of classical-liberal economics - from the 1830s onward? You guessed it, Abraham Lincoln.
“From his first political stirrings in the early 1830s, Abraham Lincoln never had a doubt where his allegiances lay. Henry Clay, Lincoln said, was “my beau ideal of a statesman,” and when Lincoln attached himself to Clay’s newly organized Whig party in the 1830s, he became, a fellow lawyer recalled, “as stiff as a man can be in his Whig doctrines.” In his first political campaign, in 1832, Lincoln announced that “time and experience have verified to a demonstration the public utility of internal improvements.” In the state legislature, Lincoln emerged as the Illinois Whigs’ foremost advocate of a state bank, improved roads and bridges, and the funding of the Illinois & Michigan Canal”
On the eve of the 1860 election, there was no debate whatsoever, by the standards of the day, in regard to the proposition that Abraham Lincoln and his Republican Party were anything other than the primary standard bearers of the principles of big, centralized, government planning and interventionism in America.
Yet somehow, Mr. Guelzo still has the nerve to make assertions like this, near the end of his piece.
“Lincoln’s rule was neither “big government” nor “no government” but minimal government, with that minimum confined almost entirely to the task of removing obstacles to self-improvement and the development of ambition.”
What a joke of epic proportions!!!
On one hand, President Lincoln’s policies weren’t designed to “remove obstacles to self-improvement.” The mercantilist policies that defined the seventy year agenda of the Hamilton-Clay-Lincoln continuum were themselves the “obstacles to self-improvement” that prevented America from enjoying the benefits of a truly laissez faire capitalist free market economy in the mold of the classical-liberal tradition.
And the second assertion is even more outrageous. How in the world can the author possibly argue that Abraham Lincoln and Republicans of the 1850s-60s, whose policies were in their own day in support of much, much bigger government, much, much more centralized government, and many, many more intrusive and expensive government interventions in the economy than any of the other relevant political factions or parties of the age, possibly be the party of “minimal government?”
This last assertion is as absurd as if I were to suggest to you today that the Obama Administration and the progressive socialist wing of the modern Democratic Party (in comparison to say the Jim Demint/Rand Paul wing of the modern GOP) is the party of “minimal government.”
Finally, if we look at what President Lincoln did while in office, he took the opportunity of the exodus of the Southerners from Congress to exact during the war pretty much the entirety of the big government, statist, freedom-sucking, state-sovereignty destroying mercantilist agenda that dated back to Alexander Hamilton (the arch nemesis of the true classical-liberal - which today would be called a conservative - Thomas Jefferson), which laid the governmental foundation for our modern, centralized, progressive, and statist present.
According to Mr. Guelzo...
“The landmark pieces of legislation that he signed between 1861 and 1865 — the Homestead Act (1862), the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act (1862), the Pacific Railway Act (1862), and the National Bank Act (1863) — together with the Morrill Tariff of 1861, which was signed into law by James Buchanan just before he turned the presidency over to Lincoln, amounted to nothing less than a repeal of six decades of Democratic dominance of the federal government.”
What President Lincoln’s agenda of massive government spending, record high taxation, abandoning of the principles of free trade, redistribution of vast amounts of other people’s money, and government empowering and ultimately currency devaluing centralized banking schemes really amounted to, was nothing less than the repeal of the principles of the American Revolution, the proper constitutional balance of power between the states and the federal government, and the beliefs of the founding fathers in regard to the proper role of government as defined by the Declaration of Independence.
Outstanding post! ;-)
You might enjoy these videos of Mike Wallace's 1959 interview of Ayn Rand:
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