All indications are that his favoring of the Whig economic program did not waver. "I was an old Henry Clay tariff whig. In old times I made more speeches on that subject, than on any other. I have not since changed my views." - A. Lincoln, October 11, 1859
or socialism as DiLorenzo sometimes intimates.
It is not direct and DiLorenzo never suggests it to be. DiLorenzo does correctly note that Lincoln's economic agenda indisputably had some rudimentary versions of a certain economic theory that also happened to be the same theory used as a base upon which a certain German economist built his entire economic system.
"I have long thought that if there be any article of necessity which can be produced at home with as little or nearly the same labor as abroad, it would be better to protect that article. Labor is the true standard of value." - Abraham Lincoln, February 15, 1861
GOPCapitalist quotes:
"I was an old Henry Clay tariff whig. In old times I made more speeches on that subject, than on any other. I have not since changed my views." - A. Lincoln, October 11, 1859
but, like Dr. Dimento, leaves out the rest of the quote in which Lincoln says that Whigenomics (my coinage - I'm in a hurry here) is NO LONGER his (to use GOPCapitalist's word) "agenda".
"Agenda" means, more or less, "things to be done". But Lincoln clearly says that the issues of slavery is, at the time of his writing, so much more important than anything else that he is pretty much willing to let Whigenomics slide -- that is, to remove it from his list of things to be done.
I don't think this is a nuance. It is a subtlety, but that's not a bad thing. Details of this kind do matter, and we make this kind of distinction in our own lives all the time, as "I still have a strong desire for a Ferrari, but the necessity of keeping a roof over my head is now so important that, while my desire for a Ferrari has never abated, I will not be acting on it any time soon."
Were I to say such a thing and were someone to characterize getting a Ferrari as my "agenda", I would just laugh, since, like LIncoln in the passage referred to above I had just pretty much renounced it as an agenda item, while admitting it was still an desire.
This is not to say that many aspects of Lincoln's economic thinking are not troubling. They are. They're also irrelevant. So, the sub-theme of this entire thread (and of many others), that Dr. Dimento is pretty much entirely unreliable as an assembler and interpreter of the data of historical material, stands, bloody but unbowed.
Selective quoting is just one of his tools (and, unfortunately, one of those of some of his defenders). We also are obliged to enjoy the outright fabrications (Lincoln to the legislature in 1857 - 1857??), the passing of blame to unverifed secondary sources (some identified and some not, see Dimento's apology/blowoff of the remarkable Siamese Twin bobble), and the gnostic insistence that his thesis stands whether or not the facts he uses to support it are really facts. I would have thought that far, far better arguments could be made for the anti-Lincoln POV. As far as I'm concerned the most troubling argument AGAINST the neo-reb position is that the facts they advance to support their stand are so unreliable.
And the second most troubling argument is that when the facts are shown not to be facts, they, or many of them, simply don't care. Their flag, they say, still flies, though the flag pole is "brast to bits". It is suspended in their minds not by the truth but by their strong desire.