It is in itself a matter of political policy, but inherent to ANY political issue of taxation is the problem of excessive and unfair rates, which are among the quickest routes to tyranny in existence. If you do not recall, the events of 1776 were brought about largely on the issue of fair taxation. That is because tax policy, though a normal and every day thing in government, can become tyranny by the simple act of overextending its burdens and collection rates.
Tariffs may be a restriction on absolute liberty, but there are many such restrictions of greater significance.
Potentially, though a tariff policy has the potential to completely gut and destroy one country's economy or build up that of another. History is replete with examples of both, suggesting that you are severely underestimating the power and dangers inherent to taxation.
In the great course of human history, protectionist trade duties don't amount to a major abuse
A good number of economic historians would staunchly disagree with you. I think Frederic Bastiat said it best: "If goods don t cross borders, armies will."
particularly when they can easily be adjusted or reduced through constitutional and democratic means.
Parliament theoretically could have used democratic means to adjust or even remove the colonial taxes that the Americans were up in arms over. Doesn't mean they have to do it though!
Try as I might, I can't convince myself that slavery is a matter of moral indifference
Then don't try to convince yourself that. You also will find that nobody expects you to convince yourself that.
and protectionism the great beast of iniquity.
Protectionism's problems are inherent. They do not arise from some silly comparative relativism to slavery. My contention is and always has been that protectionism's problems are inherent to protectionism, and that tax abuse is a problem unto itself. You on the other hand keep attempting to view it through the lens of slavery and slavery alone. As a matter of fact, you seem to have some irrational persuasion toward viewing many things through slavery when they are brought up by others as issues per se. Why is that?
I also find it hard to believe that unionists would go to war for tariffs
The difficulty you are having with such a belief is not rational as history is replete with examples of nations going to war on motives heavily guided by economics. No suggestion has been made that tariffs alone drove The Lincoln to invade, but the evidence does show they weighed heavily as an issue.
and secessionists simply free their slaves peacefully and voluntarily after going to war to keep them.
There is certainly a question as to when emancipation would occur, but worldwide historical trends make it highly unlikely that slavery in the south, and especially in a geographically restricted confederacy, would have extended significantly longer than elsewhere in the world.
Perhaps mandatory reeducation sessions at the Mises Institute locked in a cell with only DiLorenzo's Lincoln, the Confederate Catechism and Mises Big Book to keep me company will convince me of the error of my ways.
Nah. Unlike the Claremont Institute, our guys tend not to operate on the motive of stomping out any organized opposition to their dogma of The Lincoln. I'm perfectly content that there are people out there who could think favorably upon the real person of Abraham Lincoln even though I do not do so myself. I do take issue though with people who diefy his existence into an infallable idol and then procede to wage war upon those who publicly call their heresy.
Perhaps it will also teach me how to throw around pompous rhetorical labels to obscure the weaknesses in arguments
It seems that the Claremont camp has already left you quite skilled at the art of obscuring weak arguments. Why else would you throw out the diversionary red herring of slavery for comparison whenever you are called on comments about another issue as it exists per se?
or how to ignore the fact that each of us ducks as many arguments as we answer
That is often the nature of the game. Some duck excessively though by throwing out their preselected red herring of slavery to obscure another issue on which they are being pressured.
or how to maintain a fanatical confidence that I have the truth and that no one's responses can ever call my beliefs into question or even cast them in a new light.
Now that sounds like a textbook description of Walt if I ever heard one.
My argument was that on balance Lincoln was not a force for tyranny. You brought up tariffs. I responded that tariffs were a matter of ordinary government policy. I would have gone further into this but we have rehashed the issue at length earlier. It's clear that neither Washington, nor Hamilton, nor Madison considered protective tariffs tyrannical or incompatible with liberty. On balance, I said, Lincoln was a force for more, not less liberty.
You've insisted that the discussion was about tariffs and that my mention of slavery was a "red herring." But slavery is something that has to be taken into the balance. It was an implicit part of my argument from the beginning. And if you look at the thread title, it's "Setting the Record Straight: Lincoln's Wisdom on the Politics of Race ," and clearly has more to do with slavery than with tariffs. on
If you want to talk about tariffs in isolation, fine, but don't act as though a broader focus is somehow illegitimate or a "red herring." Seen in the context of history or of the thread, a narrow and inclusive focus on tariffs, looks like a real "red herring."
There were hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of people who disagreed with Lincoln about tariffs, yet agreed with him about slavery and secession, and on balance regretted his passing. And there were tens of thousands or more who agreed with Lincoln on tariffs, yet still fought against him on other grounds. If you do want to talk about tariffs in isolation from other factors, Non-Sequitur may still be waiting for the extended economic analysis you offered to provide him with two weeks ago.
But for the record: The argument against taxation without representation advanced during the revolution doesn't allow those who throw away their right to representation to cry about tax levels. And the idea of your "guys" at Mises Institute not imposing a narrow orthodoxy on their fellows is laughable. In grammatical English, we do not use articles before proper names. And "diefy" is not a word.