This looked interesting, though:
International Mount Rushmore Constest: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and T. Roosevelt. "If they could speak today, what might they say?" Free. All ages. $500 U.S. Savings Bonds or Mt. Rushmore Coins and Stamps among the prizes.
I can't wait to see how Di Lorenzo, Sobran and Dietemann would answer the question. Unfortunately, one can't expect admirable past historical figures to correspond exactly to 21st century libertarian dogmas. Nor is it the case that pursuing a narrow, undeviating Misean course would have benefited the country.
But the problem with these debates is that they take separate issues which may have separate answers and combine them into a single indictment. Was Lincoln's economic policy wise or just or in the American tradition? The parts of the question may have very different answers which reflect differently on Lincoln. Was it at the center of his thinking in the Fifties and Sixties? Highly unlikely. Was there some indisputable constitutional right to secession? Also unlikely. Was there a right by White Southerners to self-determination? Did Lincoln have a right to oppose their rebellion? And regardless of rights, what ought they and he to have done? Was Lincoln justified in taking extraordinary measures to preserve the Union? Were those measures worse than what was done in the rebel states? Would any American political leader have acted differently? Was there some deeper connection between those measures and Lincoln's political or economic philosophy?
There are so many questions involved that it's only passion and willfulness that keeps the answers together to form an solid indictment. The more we think about the different questions involved, the harder it is to argue that things were all black and white or cut and dried.
Also, we can never say with any certainty what things would have been like had the other side won. Therefore we can never say with certitude whether Lincoln's path was better or worse than what would otherwise have happened.
Dogmatists will say that self-determination should always be respected or that any violation of civil liberties makes a government a tyranny. One might consider the present situation in the Middle East, though. It seems impossible to fully grant self-determination for all or to fully respect everyone's civil liberties in a situation like that of Israel/Palestine today. In theory, our own national crisis ought to have been easier to resolve than the present Middle East conflict. That it wasn't easily resolved was the fault of more than just one man. Nor was violence introduced by just one man.
Anyway, here is a good response to the "Lincoln the tyrant" school, and here's a new critical review of Di Lorenzo.
Of course Lincoln and his Republican party supported tariffs, as had many Federalists, Democrats, and Whigs before them. They understood, as DiLorenzo does not, that all economics is political economics, and that in a world dominated by monarchs it made sense to encourage the expansion of American manufacturing power through tariffs. According to DiLorenzo's libertarian-public choice analysis, Alexander Hamilton and his Whig followers -- Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and Lincoln above all -- were arch-villain "statists" for supporting tariffs, while Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John C. Calhoun were defenders of "free trade." DiLorenzo seems not to know that the first protective tariff in American history (1816) was introduced by Calhoun and supported by Madison and Jefferson, and opposed by Webster. DiLorenzo is so blinded by his commitment to purely theoretical free trade that he is oblivious to the real growing division between pro-slavery and pro-freedom forces in America in the 1850s. He cannot see that tariffs were in the service of free trade because they were in the service of freedom: tariffs advantaged free labor and put the squeeze on slave-labor economies.
The answer he gave is equivalent to the following piece from the Kessler piece you also link to:
The tariff. Yes, Lincoln and the Republicans did stand for a high tariff in order to protect American workingmen and foster American manufacturing. This sounds today like bad economic policy, but Alexander Hamilton, who originally recommended it in the 1780s, knew his Adam Smith quite well and realized that all economics is political economy. In a world dominated by powerful monarchies, the success of America's republican experiment depended on achieving a certain measure of national power, including manufacturing capacity, quickly. In a republic threatened domestically by slavery and by the Union's own far-flung dimensions, the tariff policy operated to reduce the comparative advantages of slave labor and to encourage the diversification and expansion of our internal market. Under these circumstances, the principle of free trade made no sense as a comprehensive policy, any more than free trade in all goods and technologies would have made sense with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, or makes sense with Communist China today. Free trade, in the first place, must serve freedom.
I also asked Krannawitter whether "longtime friend and colleague Henry Clay" was accurate -- I don't know that Lincoln was a longtime friend or longtime colleague of Clay. Krannawitter agreed that something like "hero" would be better, or, in Lincoln's own words, "beaux ideal of a statesman."