The fealing is mutual.
You habitually ignore, avoid or dismiss out of hand views that don't accord with yours.
I don't believe I've excessively avoided or dismissed that which is at hand in the conversation. I will readily concede to dismissing your little slavery equivalency charade, but I've already stated my reasons for doing so and stand by them as sound. Beyond that I would ask that you specify your allegations as I don't believe I've committed in any serious way what you accuse me of doing.
That's par for the course, but what's offensive is the way you change what the argument is about and attack others for not arguing what you think they should.
As is often the case with you, that statement would be well suited for a mirror. As for your allegation, I think we may assess its merits in the history of this discussion. You began with the comment that various political policies of The Lincoln, most of them economic, were not a recipe for big government. I challenged that assertion and made the case that they were. Rather than responding to my case, you threw the issue of slavery in the bag, evidently with hopes that by doing so you could respond not by addressing the intrinsic problems raised by economic policies under The Lincoln, but instead by their relative position as gauged by you through the lens of slavery. I then responded by pointing out the fallacy of that tactic and calling you to task on using it, to which you respond now by alleging that I'm trying to restrict your argument to my mold, and that is where we stand right now.
Now, it seems to me that your grievance is based on my dismissal of your attempt to use a tactic of diversion to alter the debate's subject matter into what you percieve to be your favor. That being the case, I respond that your grievance is without merit because it pertains to my refusal of your attempted manuever for similar lack of merit.
My argument was that on balance Lincoln was not a force for tyranny.
Your initial argument was that a list of The Lincoln's economic policies provided in your earlier post were not themselves a recipe for tyranny. I responded to that point, and you responded to me with a relativist judgment of them through the lens of slavery, an issue that is not intrinsic to the discussion of those policies.
I responded that tariffs were a matter of ordinary government policy.
That you did, and I offered my response as it pertains to taxing policy's relation to tyranny. I do not see any further response from you.
It's clear that neither Washington, nor Hamilton, nor Madison considered protective tariffs tyrannical or incompatible with liberty.
Nor do I suggest that protective tariffs are always tyrannical or incompatable with liberty. I do say though that abusive taxing policies are tyrannical and incompatible with liberty and, considering the presence of that issue as a central point of contention in the American Revolution, I do not believe you could successfully maintain that the founding fathers would disagree.
On balance, I said, Lincoln was a force for more, not less liberty.
That is your belief and you are entitled to argue it. Mine is that the gains in liberty under The Lincoln were outweighed by the losses in liberty caused in the denial of life by war, the destruction of homes and livlihood by the practices of that war, and the continued expansion of government power as a result of that war. It is my belief that The Lincoln won a pyrrhic victory.
You've insisted that the discussion was about tariffs and that my mention of slavery was a "red herring."
When you randomly toss out the issue of slavery as a relative standard by which to view all else that is being discussed, your mention of it is a red herring.
But slavery is something that has to be taken into the balance.
Yes, in a discussion of the war as a whole. But you threw it out there during a discussion of several specific economic issues and then proceded to use it as a relative standard by which to view those issues. As an argument, that type of a tactic is unsupportable.
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."
I would not do that to a broader focus. I would react that way, and did so accordingly, in the event that what you purport to be a broader practice is in reality a diversionary fish thrown out to reorient the discussion away from intrinsic consideration of The Lincoln's policies to a relative judgement of them through the lens of an issue external to their discussion, slavery.
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.
Every cause has its minority of opponents somewhere. The fact that they exist does not make them equal in size to those opposite of them. In this particular case, the country divided over the tariff along lines virtually identical to the war as is evidenced in the May 1860 House vote on the Morrill tariff.
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.
Non-Sequitur did not indicate during the course of that discussion that his interests were in doing so, or if he did, I must have missed it. I attempted this once before with him several months ago and went into extensive detail with formulas and import-export figures, but he ignored it and went back to the same old line of entry ports he has been towing ever since. Therefore I am hesitant to expend the effort as long as he is unreceptive to it. If he will indicate otherwise, I will do my best to accomodate him. But until then...
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.
Your argument here smells of chickens and eggs. One could just as easily say that the action of removing itself from the union government was in part brought about by the advancing installment of a the very same tax. Did the tax cause them to leave, or did they leave causing the tax? Citing the May 1860 sectional trends, I say the tax. If you care to argue differently you are free to do so.
And the idea of your "guys" at Mises Institute not imposing a narrow orthodoxy on their fellows is laughable.
If you wish to make your case, please do so. I'll happily do the same with Claremont though and point out that Claremont's network extends much deeper than you allege of "ours."
In grammatical English, we do not use articles before proper names.
Yet concepts are a different story. If you have not yet noticed, I maintain that the concept of The Lincoln, espoused by many around here, is significantly different from the man Abraham Lincoln in his worldly existence.
And "diefy" is not a word.
Neither is "demostrate" for that matter. On that note, I anticipate that you see the sillyness and potential dangers of letting this slip into a game of "typo patrol." If you have anything further to offer to this discussion though, I look forward to it.
Of course we all indulge in arguments that might not be the best. I do it as well. I certainly admit that I have reacted hastily sometimes and made mistakes, but my hope was to get beyond shallow tit for tat, at least sometimes. Scoring ephemeral points against each other or chalking up hollow, rhetorical victories doesn't advance our understanding a whit.
I began by responding to the characterization of Lincoln as a "big government thug." I thought to deal directly with what I took to be the commonest arguments against Lincoln. I maintained that Lincoln's protectionist and developmental policies can't simply be characterized as "thuggery" and aren't very "big government" by 20th century standards and were in consonance with the policies of other, earlier and highly respected political leaders.
There are other reasons why Lincoln wasn't a "big government thug." We have been arguing related questions long enough, that I presumed it to be understood that we all have arguments that, in such an informal discussion, we don't bring forward immediately. The size of government contracted after the war. Lincoln was trying to deal with a rebellion and the chaos it brought. And yes, slavery was the ultimate in thuggery and required a large governmental apparatus to maintain it. That isn't a red herring. And facing it is unavoidable in coming to a balanced assessment of the Civil War era.
You seem to associate discussion of slavery with "relativism." I have to wonder what you mean by "relativism." In truth, that discussion introduces absolute moral concerns into debate. There are of course other moral absolutes, but if slavery isn't wrong, then nothing is wrong. Taking slavery off the table creates an atmosphere of relativism. Just as wholly removing other questions of right and wrong from any historical discussion would.
You seem to be saying that including such a powerful absolute moral issue as slavery in the discussion leads to a "relativistic" acceptance of other evils. But surely the same result is produced if one makes free trade or state sovereignty or racial equality or inequality an absolute value. Perhaps we should take these off the table as well. The fact that an issue weighs heavily against one's side morally certainly doesn't mean that talking about it relativizes dicussion of the matter at hand.
Comparison of the goods and evils brought by any course of action is not relativism. It is inherent in any practical application of morality. Excluding such moral concerns because those on the other side may outweigh those on one's own is true relativism. I don't argue that opposition to slavery justifies everything, but one can't come to a fair assessment of how things stood, practically or morally, without taking slavery into account.
If you read Jaffa, rather than merely abuse him, you would understand the moral importance of the question of slavery and its expansion. While Jaffa may have his faults, he certainly does have a deeper, more comprehensive and more philosophical understanding than DiLorenzo or any other neo-confederate hack of the week. And one can't express moral fervor about tariffs and simply ignore the question of slavery or call it a "red herring."
This eternal "tit for tat," "I'm rubber you're glue" leads nowhere. I do have some respect for your intelligence, or at least cleverness. You have a very quick mind, but your general behavior isn't that of a person I want to talk to, so I will sign off this discussion.