The Principle Of The Gold Standard Part 8

Editor Notes:

I discovered a remarkable thinker and author recently. Antal E. Fekete is a Professor at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. He has written outstanding articles and does compelling lectures about money. This is a ten-part series on the gold standard. Ladies and Gentlemen, the first thing that a state must do at secession is invent a monetary system…that is the Power of the Purse. Creating gold money is a lot easier than you think.

The Principle Of The Gold Standard Part 8

The Principle of the Gold Standard Part 2

Editor Notes:

I discovered a remarkable thinker and author recently. Antal E. Fekete is a Professor at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. He has written outstanding articles and does compelling lectures about money. This is a ten-part series on the gold standard. Ladies and Gentlemen, the first thing that a state must do at secession is invent a monetary system…that is the Power of the Purse. Creating gold money is a lot easier than you think.

The Principle of the Gold Standard Part Two

It’s Comedy Friday

I’m going for straight-up laughs today, Friends. This song will never get any radio air play, but it’s worth watching Vince Gill and Rodney Crowell in drag. OH. MY. GOD.

Bravery Hurts

Never Trust Anyone Who Hasn’t Been Punched in the Face

by Scott Locklin

(Editor’s note: A state that secedes from the Union must build its militia as one of its first acts. That means that every able-bodied man or woman age 18 to age 55 is a rifleman and trained as a soldier. Non-able bodied persons can do desk work or cook meals. Militia training is exactly the sort of training this featured author is speaking about. I guarantee you that a new nation with a citizen militia trained to kill and fight would be a formidable nation. Ask Switzerland. We hope that one day soon the secession and independence movements will begin having serious public discussions about the very real possibility of armed resistance in the process of secession.)

Conservatives like to talk about the causes of Western Civilization’s downfall: feminism, loose morality, drug abuse, Christianity’s decline, reality TV. Blaming civilization’s downfall on lardy hagfish such as Andrea Dworkin is like a doctor diagnosing senility by an old person’s wrinkles. The fact that anyone listened to such a numskull is a symptom, not the cause, of a culture in decline. The cause of civilizational decline is dirt-simple: lack of contact with objective reality. The great banker-journalist (and founder of the original National Review) Walter Bagehot said it well almost 150 years ago:

History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.

Every great civilization reaches a point of prosperity where it is possible to live your entire life as a pacifist without any serious consequences. Many civilizations have come to the state of devolution represented by modern Berkeley folkways, from wife-swapping to vegetarianism. These ideas don’t come from a hardscrabble existence in contact with nature’s elemental forces; they are the inevitable consequence of being an effete urban twit removed from meaningful contact with reality. The over-civilized will try to portray their decadence as something “highly evolved” and worthy of emulation because it can only exist in the hothouse of highly civilized urban centers, much like influenza epidemics. Somehow these twittering blockheads missed out on what the word “evolution” means. Evolution involves brutal and often violent natural selection, and these people have not been exposed to brutal evolutionary forces any more than a typical urban poodle.

Through human history, vigorous civilizations had various ways of dealing with the unfortunate human tendency toward being a weak ninny. The South Koreans (for my money, the hardest men in Asia today) have brutally tough military training as a rite of passage. I’ve been told that the Soviet system had students picking potatoes during national holidays. The ancient Greeks used competitive sports and constant warfare. The Anglo-American working classes, the last large virtuous group of people left in these countries, use bullying, violent sports, fisticuffs, and hard living.

I think there is a certain worldview that comes from violent experience. It’s something like…manhood. You don’t have to be the world’s greatest badass to be a man, but you have to be willing to throw down when the time is right.

A man who has been in a fight or played violent sports has experienced more of life and manhood than a man who hasn’t. Fisticuffs, wrestling matches, knife fights, violent sport, duels with baseball bats, facing down guns, or getting crushed in the football field—men who have had these experiences are different from men who have not. Men who have trained for or experienced such encounters know about bravery and mental fortitude from firsthand experience. Men who have been tested physically know that inequality is a physical fact. Men who know how to deal out violence know that radical feminism’s tenets—that women and men are equal—are a lie. We know that women are not the same as men: not physically, mentally, or in terms of moral character.

Men who have fought know how difficult it is to stand against the crowd and that civilization is fragile and important. A man who has experienced violence knows that, at its core, civilization is an agreement between men to behave well. That agreement can be broken at any moment; it’s part of manhood to be ready when it is. Men who have been in fights know about something that is rarely spoken of without snickering these days: honor. Men who have been in fights know that, on some level, words are just words: At some point, words must be backed up by deeds.

Above all, men who have been in fights know that there is nothing good or noble about being a victim. This is a concept the modern “conservative movement,” mostly run by wimps, has lost, probably irrevocably. They’re forever tugging at my heartstrings, from No Child Left Behind to Israel’s plight to MLK’s wonders to whining that the media doesn’t play fair to the overwrought emotional appeals they use to justify dropping bombs on Muslims. The Republicans are even taking seriously a pure victim-candidate: Michelle Bachman. As far as can be told, she’s a middle-American Barack Obama with boobs and a slightly loopier world view.

Modern “civilized” males don’t get in fistfights. They don’t play violent sports. They play video games and, at best, watch TV sports. Modern males are physical and emotional weaklings. The ideal male isn’t John Wayne or James Bond or Jimmy Stewart anymore. It’s some crying tit that goes to a therapist, a sort of agreeable lesbian with a dick who calls the police (whom he hates in theory) when there is trouble. The ideal modern male is the British shrimp who handed his pants over to the looter in south London.

How did we get here? Estrogens in the food supply? Cultural Marxism’s corrosive influence? Small families? Some of the greatest badasses I’ve known had many brothers to fight with growing up. When good men who will fight are all extinct, there is no more civilization. No lantern-jawed viragos are going to save you from the barbarian hordes. No mincing nancy boys with Harvard diplomas will stand up for the common decencies: They’re a social construct, dontcha know. The conservative movement won’t save you: They’re chicken-hearted careerists petrified of offending a victim group.

Teddy Roosevelt, my ideal President, kept a lion and a bear as pets in the White House and took his daily exercise doing jiu-jitsu and boxing. He even lost vision in an eye in a friendly boxing match while he was president. Our last three glorious leaders are men who kept fluffy dogs and went jogging. I don’t trust squirrelly girly-men in any context. When confronted with difficult decisions, they don’t do what’s right or tell the truth—they’ll do what’s easy or politically expedient. Unlike the last three, Teddy Roosevelt never sent men to die in pointless wars, though he was more than happy to go himself or risk his neck wrestling with bears.

I’m no great shakes: I’m a shrimpy egghead in a suit who thinks about math all day. I don’t train for fighting anymore, and my experiences with violence are fairly limited. Nonetheless, I judge people on these sorts of things. When I first meet a man, I don’t care what kind of sheepskins or awards he has on his walls. I don’t care if he is liberal or conservative. I want to know if they have my back in a fight. That’s really the only thing that matters.

Copyright 2011 TakiMag.com All Right Reserved

Smugglers As Heroes

by Walter E. Williams

(Editor’ Note: While I agree with Dr. Williams, he hesitates to take his argument to the most logical, most widespread smuggling enterprise of all…recreational drugs. If he is to remain true to his assertions, he would have to say that he supports the smuggling of drugs into the USA. What is the moral difference between John Hancock’s molasses and cocaine, heroin and marijuana? The “War on Drugs” has been a disaster, and will never prevent the “voluntary exchange among individuals.”)

Smugglers are heroes of sorts. The essence of what a smuggler offers is: “Government tyrants want to either prevent or interfere with peaceable voluntary exchange among individuals. I can reduce the impact of that interference.” Let’s look at smuggling, keeping in mind that not everything illegal is immoral and not everything legal is moral.

Leading up to our War of Independence, the British, under the Navigation Acts, had levied taxes on a wide range of imports. One of those taxes was on molasses imported from non-British islands. John Hancock, whose flamboyant signature graces our Declaration of Independence, had a thriving business smuggling an estimated 1.5 million gallons of molasses a year. His smuggling practices financed much of the resistance to British authority. In fact, a joke of the time was “Sam Adams writes the letters (to newspapers) and John Hancock pays the postage.”

Hancock’s smuggling, as well as that of many others, made the people of our nation better off by providing cheaper prices for molasses used for making rum. British oppressors were worse off by having lower tax revenues.

In 1920, the 18th Amendment, prohibiting the production, distribution and sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States, went into effect. It had wide public support. In my opinion, no case can be made for stopping another person from enjoying beer, wine and whiskey. That’s oppression, but along came heroes to the rescue. The ink hadn’t dried on the 18th Amendment before smugglers started smuggling beer and whiskey from Canada and Mexico. Ships lined up along our shores, just beyond the three-mile limit, to off-load whiskey onto speedboats. Smugglers and bootleggers spared millions of Americans from do-gooder oppression.

While the smuggler qua smuggler is my hero, several important negative effects surround his activity. Smuggling is illegal. It becomes a sometimes-nasty criminal enterprise because those who engage in it tend to be people with an overall lower regard for the law. Since smuggling is illegal, disputes must be settled with guns and violence instead of courts. Plus, police and other public officials are corrupted. Worse of all is the reduced respect for laws by the public at large. After the 18th Amendment’s repeal, virtually all of the crime and corruption associated with Prohibition disappeared.

Not many Americans are aware of today’s big smuggling activity – cigarette smuggling. Confiscatory taxes that are as high as $7 a pack, in New York City, making one pack of cigarettes sell for $13, have encouraged a thriving smuggling business across our country. Like Prohibition, confiscatory tobacco taxes are popular with Americans.

A recent study by Michael LaFaive and Todd Nesbit of the Midland, Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy titled “Cigarette Taxes and Smuggling” shows that states with the highest cigarette smuggling rates are those with the highest tobacco taxes such as Arizona (51.8 percent of the state’s total consumption are smuggled), New York (47.5 percent), Rhode Island (40.5 percent), New Mexico (37.2 percent) and California (36.3 percent).

Cigarette smuggling, like yesteryear’s whiskey smuggling, has become a livelihood for criminals. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has found that Russian, Armenian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Taiwanese and Middle Eastern (mainly Pakistani, Lebanese and Syrian) organized crime groups are highly involved in the trafficking of contraband and counterfeit cigarettes. What’s worse is that some of these groups use their earnings to provide financial assistance to terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas. That means tax-hungry politicians and anti-tobacco zealots are providing the means for aid to America’s enemies.

The solution to cigarette smuggling, and the criminal activities associated with it, is to eliminate the confiscatory taxes. Unfortunately for tax-hungry politicians and anti-tobacco zealots, who see confiscatory taxes as a tool in their moral crusade against tobacco, only benefits count. For them, the costs of their agenda are irrelevant or secondary at best. And, as novelist C.S. Lewis put it, “Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”

Walter E. Williams is the John M. Olin distinguished professor of economics at George Mason University, and a nationally syndicated columnist. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page.

Copyright © 2011 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Arizona’s Lace-Curtain Secessionists

by Bernie Quigley at www.thehill.com

First I heard about ideas like this when driving through Chapel Hill, N.C., 15 years ago and listening to a radio interview with Dr. J. Michael Hill, writer and founder of The League of the South, a secessionist organization that seeks through democratic and non-violent means a “free and independent Southern republic.”

It was a local NPR show and quite a generous interview, as I recall. The interviewer brought to her story that morning surprise so featured in NPR stories in those days when it was discovered that penguin husbands sat on the eggs (Huh!”) or pig snouts could actually smell out truffles in the hills of North Carolina. Now that is something to think about. And here was a guy who wanted to reawaken the Confederacy.

Before the cry of the Orcs went up, he did manage to get a word in. Isn’t it against the law to, you know, secede, asked the interviewer?

Reared in Rhode Island, where we were taught funny things about the South — possibly because of the vastness of our involvement in the slave trade — I was quite surprised by the answer. As I recall, he said that it was one of those historic snafus. When Ulysses S. Grant became president after the Civil War, Jefferson Davis, president of the South, was in prison, pending, potentially, a trial for treason for advocating the secession of the Southern states. But Grant was advised that such a trial would open or reopen a can of worms because Davis may have been within his constitutional rights in that regard. The invasion of the South as it hatched in the minds of Northern thinkers was called “higher law” in motive. It would be a moral campaign to end slavery. It was not constitutionally sanctioned. In fact, Jefferson had written a secession clause in Virginia’s Constitution and New York and Rhode Island had one too. (Huh!)

This little breach of constitutional etiquette did not go unnoticed here in Vermont and New Hampshire when George W. Bush invaded Iraq, an invasion that took place with full cooperation of an appeasing and weakling Congress of Easter Peeps and a cowardly and accommodating Supreme Court; an invasion that brought torture, stripped Americans of their most basic constitutional rights, repealed habeas corpus and unleashed other un-American and unconstitutional strategies. An invasion for which men of honor lied outright at the United Nations and the press went along fully embedded in the cause.

It was in my opinion inspired by “the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man” — John Locke’s phrase to describe the essence of tyranny. So secession was proposed in Vermont.

Now liberal Arizona wants to secede from conservative Arizona simply because it lost influence in a recent election. Paul Starobin, author of After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age, wonders what California would look like broken in three. Or a Republic of New England. “Picture an America that is run not, as now, by a top-heavy Washington autocracy but, in freewheeling style, by an assemblage of largely autonomous regional republics reflecting the eclectic economic and cultural character of the society,” he has written.

Capote’s Holly Golightly meets Nathan Bedford Forrest. In an age where world opinion is formed on Oprah’s couch, Nobel prizes are given to just anybody and Lady Gaga forms the mind (or mindlessness) of a generation, the question that should be asked is, is there anything left? Is there anything to retrieve? Is there anything worth retrieving?

© 2011 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc.

Ron Paul: First President of New Texas?

by Russell D. Longcore

reprint from 12-13-09

When Texas inevitably secedes from the United States, it will need a President. I nominate favorite son Ron Paul, of Lake Jackson, Texas as the first President of the new nation.

There is no other person that has the credentials of Dr. Ron Paul. Doctor Paul ran a successful ob/gyn medical practice before entering politics, so he knows small business. He served as a flight surgeon in the U.S. Air Force during the 1960s. He has been a US Congressman for Texas’ 14th District since 1997, returning to Congress after previously serving in the same capacity in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. He knows the Washington culture and the Washington games from the inside. His record of voting against pork-barrel spending has gotten him the nickname “Dr. No.” Congressman Paul has often been the lone voice on Capitol Hill for compliance with the Constitution of the United States. Paul enjoys a national reputation as the premier advocate for liberty in politics today. Dr. Paul is the leading spokesman in Washington for limited constitutional government, low taxes, free markets, and a return to sound monetary policies based on commodity-backed currency.

Recently, Paul sponsored HR 1207, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, designed to regulate and audit the Federal Reserve. On December 9, 2009, he introduced the Free Competition in Currency Act in Congress, which if enacted, would get the government out of the money business.

He is known among both his colleagues in Congress and his constituents for his consistent voting record in the House of Representatives: Dr. Paul never votes for legislation unless the proposed measure is expressly authorized by the Constitution.

No other person in Texas can show a lifelong commitment to liberty like Ron Paul can proffer. No governor, Senator or other Congressman can compare their voting records and legislative records with Congressman Paul. All others would be proven to be big-government spenders and friends to tyrants…or tyrants themselves.

I heartily encourage Ron Paul to voice his support for Nullification and eventual Secession in a prepared statement delivered in an open session of the United States House of Representatives. That would throw an ideological hand grenade into the Washington political culture that would reverberate from that moment forward into the history books. That one speech would mesmerize and captivate the Main Stream Media. Paul, his speech and Texas would be the Number One headline for weeks. The line of media interview requests for Rep. Paul would be as long as the Rio Grande…and just about as shallow.

Few events could bolster the cause of nationhood for Texas as the unflagging support of Ron Paul. I dare to say that few events could galvanize the support of Texas citizens as much as Ron Paul’s support of the concepts of Nullification and Secession.

Not since John C. Calhoun’s advocacy of Nullification in the 1830s, and the formal secession of South Carolina in 1860, would Washington’s applecart be up-ended like a simple statement of support of Nullification and Secession from Ron Paul.

But please note: I am not recommending that ANY ACTION toward secession be taken any time soon. The national political events that will precipitate secession have yet to occur. And Timing Is Everything.

Just as George Washington was swept into the Presidency after the 1776 secession, so too would Ron Paul be the logical and emotional choice for Texas.

Perhaps Dr. Paul could convince Judge Andrew Napolitano to relocate to Texas and become the first Vice President or Chief Justice of the New Texas Supreme Court?

The Texas Nationalist Movement is the current driving force for the secession of Texas from the United States. The TNM is presently reaching out to Texans across the state and telling the story of the many reasons that nationhood is best for Texas…and Texans.

The TNM is currently spearheading a petition drive to collect signatures from Texans who support the concept of secession. TNM leaders want to be able to present thousands of signatures to the Governor on January 11, 2011, the opening day of the next Texas legislative session. The petition requests that a straight up or down referendum be scheduled so that the people of Texas may vote themselves whether or not to secede from the Union.

Fore more information about the Texas Nationalist Movement, go to: www.TexasNationalist.com A basic membership is a mere $20.

DumpDC. Six Letters That Can Change History.

© Copyright 2009, Russell D. Longcore. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

Stop Voting!

(I am reposting this 2009 article, since we are coming up on another mid-term election.)

Sounds almost treasonous, doesn’t it? But lovers of liberty must consider this very radical action.

This election cycle has become interminably long and boring. The worst possible candidates from the Republican and Democrat parties have floated to the top, much like what you see when you glance down into a toilet bowl.

This situation in which the nation finds itself is not uncommon. The state primaries, caucuses and major party conventions have a long and checkered history of corruption. Primaries, caucuses and conventions have been occurring for scores of decades.

The “political system” virtually guarantees that the most corrupt, the best liars, the most compromising, becomes the presumptive candidate. Both candidates are also the politician of their party most willing to violate the Constitution by continuing an unlawful war, and by initiating and approving the highest amount of unconstitutional Federal spending.

Think about it. McCain, Palin, Obama and Biden. Out of over 300 million people in the United States, these four people are surely not the most qualified, the smartest, the most educated, the most experienced candidates to run the Federal government of the United States, are they?

There’s an old saying, “Actions speak louder than words.” Said another way, “If you want to know what a person values, don’t listen to what they say, only watch what they do.” Think about it. The political system in America is populated with men and women who give lip service to the Constitution, but then go on to vote for every unconstitutional spending bill presented to them. They talk about the virtues of our constitutional republic, and then act to subvert and violate that very system of government.

A pure constitutionalist has no place, and no political base, in America in 2008. Consider the candidacy of Rep. Ron Paul during the Republican primary season. Paul couldn’t get arrested, much less have a legitimate shot at winning or even to be noticed by mainstream media.

So why do I strongly urge you to stop Voting?

1. The illegitimacy of the vote. Look at the situation of paper ballots versus electronic voting. It has been proved beyond doubt that voting machines all across America have been manipulated to change outcomes of elections. In light of the proven fact that you cannot be sure your vote counts, why continue voting?

2. Illegitimacy part II. Consider the incontrovertible facts of national elections…and many times, state and local elections. In 2004, about 125 million people had their votes counted. (Many hundreds of thousands more people actually voted, but their votes did not count for a variety of reasons…don’t get me started!) But elections for decades now break in this statistical fashion:

40% vote Republican

40% vote Democrat

20% undecided are in the middle.

Realistically, the Republican and Democrat voting blocks cancel each other out automatically. So if you’re a registered Republican or Democrat, your vote is wasted. The time you spend voting is wasted. Tell that to all of the people you know who tell you that voting for a third-party candidate is a wasted vote!

It is the 20% in the middle that decides the election. Specifically, 10% plus one vote decides the winner.

Look at the rough numbers from the 2004 Presidential race:

Total votes 125,000,000

Republican 50,000,000

Democrat 50,000,000

Undecided 25,000,000

“Undecided” statistically splits in half:

Winner 12,500,001 (10% plus one vote)

Loser 12,499,999 (10% minus one vote)

So, in a nation of 300 million people, a little over 12 million people, or 4%, actually decide the Presidential election.

The statistics fall much the same in elections in which a candidate identifies with a political party. If you have a local state legislative race where Republicans and Democrats face each other, that race will be decided in much the same way as a national race.

3. Consider that, under Robert’s Rules of Order, an organization holding a vote must have a quorum in place for the vote to be legitimate. But, in American political elections, where’s the quorum?

Presidential candidates regularly consider their election “a mandate from the people.” But think about this: How small would the total number of voters have to be before a candidate would refuse to take office? If 100 million voters stayed away from the polls in November, and only 25 million nationwide voted instead of 125 million…would the winning candidate shun the victory? My gut feeling is that the candidate would still accept the outcome. And why not? There’s NOTHING in the law that I know of that prevents the winner from taking office…a veritable bottomless pit.

With an election system in place in America that is hopelessly corrupt, participation as a voter only encourages those in power…and those seeking power…to continue with the corrupt and illegitimate election system.

So, if you continue voting, you’re part of the problem, not part of the solution.

DumpDC. Six Letters That Can Change History.

© Copyright 2010, Russell D. Longcore. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

Tom DiLorenzo on Secession

by Scott Smith

(Editor’s Note: I met Tom at a Campaign For Liberty convention in Atlanta in January 2010. We are both contributing writers for LewRockwell.com, so we instantly hit it off. He and I sat together in many sessions. Tom is a delightful gentleman with a warm smile, a quick wit and a brilliant mind.)

The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with Thomas DiLorenzo.

Daily Bell: You’re prolific and widely read. So please excuse the repetition of our questions. Tell us a little bit about your background and how you became interested in economics.

Thomas DiLorenzo: I was an economics major at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, where in my first semester the professor used as a “supplementary text” a little book of essays on current economic events by Milton Friedman. They were a collection of Friedman’s Newsweek magazine columns, which he wrote in the 1970s. I loved how he used economics to explain just about everything about the economic world and economic policy. I also admired his very persuasive writing and speaking styles, and spent years in school trying to emulate it (and that of others who had similar talents). I also discovered The Freeman magazine, published by the Foundation for Economic Education, while a freshman in college, and reading through the back issues introduced me to the whole classical liberal tradition of scholarship, especially the free-market economists like Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Israel Kirzner, Friedman, and others. I earned a Ph.D. in economics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, where one of my professors was James M. Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize in economics for being one of the founders of the “Public Choice” School, which uses economic theory and methodology to analyze politics and political institutions. One of the textbooks I used in my first semester at VPI was Human Action by Ludwig von Mises. That course was my real introduction to Austrian economics, which I then pursued mostly on my own.

Daily Bell: You’re a valued member of the Mises Institute. When did you join?

Thomas DiLorenzo: When I was an assistant professor of economics at George Mason University in the early 1980s I received a flyer in the mail from Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell announcing the creation of the Mises Institute. I sent them a check for $35, which I suppose made me a “member.” I soon began sending them articles for their monthly publication, The Free Market, and presented papers at some of the early Mises Institute conferences. I’ve been teaching at the week-long Mises University that is held every summer for almost twenty years now. In short, I’ve been associated with the Mises Institute from its very beginning.

Daily Bell: How did you arrive at your insights about Lincoln? Explain, in a short summary if you can, what they are.

Thomas DiLorenzo: As for my research and publications on Lincoln, Civil War history was a hobby of mine for years, and I began thinking about how I could combine my profession, economics, with my hobby and get a few things published. I was struck by the fact that for his entire adult political life Lincoln was almost exclusively devoted to Hamiltonian mercantilism – high protectionist tariffs, other forms of corporate welfare, a central bank modeled after the Bank of England to pay for it all, and political patronage and matching politics. It made no sense at all that his ascendancy to the presidency had nothing to do with these issues, as America’s court historians say, or that these issues had nothing to do with the reason for the war. In fact, in his first inaugural address he literally threatened “invasion” and “bloodshed” (his exact words) if the Southern states that had seceded refused to continue to pay the federal tariff on imports, the average rate of which had just been doubled two days earlier. The entire agenda of Hamiltonian mercantilism was put into place during the Lincoln administration – along with the first income tax, the first military conscription law, and the creation of the internal revenue bureaucracy, among other monstrosities.

Daily Bell: You write about Lincoln from an economic perspective. Shouldn’t more history be written this way? It seems a natural marriage.

Thomas DiLorenzo: Most historians generally know nothing at all about economics, but that doesn’t stop them from writing book after book on economic topics, including the economics of the Civil War. There are a lot of books out there in university libraries that contain the facts about Lincoln, but these facts rarely make it into the textbooks that American children use. Education is dominated by the state, after all, and the state only criticizes past politicians who were not sufficiently statist (like Warren Harding, for instance). Being an economist and a libertarian gives one a very different lens with which to look at this information. Historians simply don’t understand the importance of how the American political economy was transformed by the Lincoln regime, and most of them are rather buffoonish, excuse-making court historians when it comes to Lincoln who is, after all, the face and image of the American empire.

Daily Bell: Was it difficult to write a revisionist history about Lincoln?

Thomas DiLorenzo: As a libertarian, I saw it as my duty to spread the truth about what a horrific tyrant Lincoln was, with his illegal suspension of Habeas Corpus and the imprisonment of tens of thousands of political dissenters in the North; his shutting down of over 300 opposition newspapers; his deportation of the leader of the congressional opposition, Democratic Congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio; and his purposeful waging of total war on civilians. He destroyed the voluntary union of the founding fathers and destroyed the system of federalism that was the hallmark of the original constitution by using military force to “prove” that nullification and secession were illegal. Might makes right. Unlike England, Spain, France, Denmark, Holland, Sweden, and other countries that ended slavery peacefully in the nineteenth century, Lincoln used the slaves as political pawns in a war that both he and the U.S. Congress declared to the world in 1861 was being waged for one reason only: to “save the union.” But as I said, he really destroyed the voluntary union of the founders.

Daily Bell: Was the Civil War popular in the North? What did people think of Lincoln in his day?

Thomas DiLorenzo: Lincoln was immensely unpopular during his time. How could he not have been, with having imprisoned tens of thousands of people in the North without any due process, shutting down hundreds of newspapers, handing thousands of Northern men death sentences in the form of military conscription, and generally ruling as a tyrant. Even with the South out of the union he only won the 1864 election with 55% of the vote, and that was after federal troops were used to rig the elections by intimidating Democratic voters at the polling places.

The Civil War was immensely unpopular in the North. That’s why Lincoln had to imprison so many dissenters and shut down most of the opposition press. It’s also why he resorted to the slavery of military conscription. There were draft riots in New York City and elsewhere. In the July, 1863 New York City draft riots Lincoln sent 15,000 troops who fired into the crowds, killing hundreds in the streets. Entire regiments of Union Army soldiers deserted on the eve of battle again and again, and tens of thousands – probably more – deserted.

Slavery could have been ended peacefully as all other nations did – and as the Northern states did – in the nineteenth century. There were still slaves in New York City as late as 1853. The real purpose of the war was to end once and for all the ability of American citizens to control the federal government by possessing the powers given to them by the Tenth Amendment, including the power of nullifying unconstitutional federal laws, and secession or the threat of secession. Thomas Jefferson believed that the Tenth Amendment was the cornerstone of the Constitution. Lincoln, who was the political son of Jefferson’s nemesis, Alexander Hamilton, removed that cornerstone by orchestrating the murder of some 350,000 fellow American citizens, including more than 50,000 civilians according to historian James McPherson.

Jefferson’s dream of an “empire of liberty” was ended once and for all, and America was on the road to becoming just another corrupt, mercantilist empire like the British and Spanish empires.

Daily Bell: We notice that municipal corruption began right after the Civil War. Were eruptions such as Tammany Hall mere coincidences or a symptom of something deeper?

Thomas DiLorenzo: It was no mere coincidence that the post-war Grant administration became notorious for political corruption associated with the government subsidization of the transcontinental railroads. American politicians had debated the constitutionality of granting taxpayer-financed subsidies to corporations ever since 1789. The biggest opposition to the subsidies came from the South: presidents Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, and Tyler all opposed them, or insisted that the Constitution be amended first to permit them. Northern politicians were always the biggest supporters of corporate welfare.

Daily Bell: Did the Civil War mark the end of the US as a republic and the beginning of the US as an empire?

Thomas DiLorenzo: In The Real Lincoln I quote the historian Leonard P. Curry as saying that after the war there were no longer any “constitutional scruples” about squandering taxpayers’ money on corporate boondoggles. The railroads were only the beginning of what is on display today with multi-trillion dollar bailouts of Wall Street, General Motors and Chrysler, and even now the Greek banks (which Wall Street must be heavily invested in).

Daily Bell: Did British and European bankers secretly back the North during the Civil War even though the perception was that Britain was sympathetic to the South?

Thomas DiLorenzo: There was no secret conspiracy of British bankers to support the Lincoln regime. The Lincoln administration financed the war with tax revenue, the printing of “Greenbacks” (which created massive inflation), and borrowing, including borrowing from European bankers. It was all out in the open. This is how governments always finance wars.

Daily Bell: Why didn’t the South just stand down? There’s a theory that if the South had simply declared its independence and walked away that there would not have been much the North could do. Why did the South willingly embark on a shooing war?

Thomas DiLorenzo: The South did not “embark on a shooting war’” Lincoln did. The states were sovereign, and therefore had a right to secede, as they do today. Article 7 of the Constitution proves this by stating that the Constitution is to be ratified by political conventions of the states. No human being was harmed, let alone killed during the bombing of Fort Sumter. South Carolinians considered the fort to be their property, paid for with their tax dollars, and erected for their protection. Lincoln responded to Fort Sumter with a full-scale invasion of all the Southern states that ended up killing some 350,000 Southerners. For this he is hailed as “a great statesman” by our court historians.

Daily Bell: Still, there are those who believe it was a mistake for the South to have initiated hostilities at all.

Thomas DiLorenzo: Lincoln had sent warships to Charleston Harbor, and successfully duped the South Carolinians into foolishly firing on the fort. Afterwards, Lincoln wrote a letter of thanks and congratulation to his naval commander Gustavus Fox for assisting him in getting the war started in this way. It was the biggest political miscalculation in American history: Lincoln (and many other Northerners) believed the war would be relatively bloodless and last only a few weeks or months.

Daily Bell: It was a terrible tragedy and still evokes strong emotions today. Have you brought anyone in mainstream academia over to your side?

Thomas DiLorenzo: There are many American academics who have thanked me for writing my books on Lincoln, and they are using them in their classrooms. But the “Lincoln Cult,” as I call it, is a lost cause. These are people whose human capital is entirely wrapped up in the spinning of fairy tales and myths about Lincoln; revealing the truth about the real Lincoln destroys their life’s work, so I am not the least bit concerned about persuading any of them. My books are written for the general public, students, and open-minded academics who don’t have a financial stake in maintaining the false Lincoln myths.

Daily Bell: Has American academia become at least a little more evenhanded as a result of your exposes?

Thomas DiLorenzo: The Lincoln myth has deified not only Lincoln but the American presidency in general. The poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren once wrote that the war gave the North a “treasury of virtue” because of all the myths that were fabricated after the war. In war, the victors always write the history. This false virtue has been used ever since to portray American foreign policy as benevolent, selfless, and saintly. Thus, there are many people with careers, income and wealth dependent upon the propping up of the American foreign policy establishment with the myth of “American exceptionalism.” Anything “we” do is right and just, simply because it is “we” who are doing it.

Daily Bell: Why was Lincoln assassinated? Did he break with the monetary backers of the Civil War in your opinion?

Thomas DiLorenzo: As for why Lincoln was assassinated, I suspect it was simply an act of revenge for having micromanaged the murder of hundreds of thousands of fellow American citizens from the Southern states; burning many of their cities and towns to the ground; and plundering tens of millions of dollars of private property. Southerners also knew that Lincoln had attempted to have their president, Jefferson Davis, assassinated by Union Army soldiers. (Look up “The Dahlgren Raid” on the Web).

Daily Bell: Is the US really several nations? Do states have the right to secede today?

Thomas DiLorenzo: I think secession is not only possible but necessary if any part of America is every to be considered “the land of the free” in any meaningful sense. As Thomas Jefferson said late in life, if the country becomes several different republics, “they will all be our children.” He meant that they would all still be Americans, and he wished them all well. His view of secession was the exact opposite of Lincoln’s tyrannical “pay up or die” declaration from his first inaugural address.

Daily Bell: Has the Internet helped publicize your work? Would your work have received as much attention without the Internet?

Thomas DiLorenzo: One only has to look at the Web site of the Mises Institute to see that there is a great deal of research and publication going on by scholars who are educated in Austrian economics and who consider themselves to be defenders of a free society. My friend Thomas E. Woods has published two New York Times bestsellers (The Politically-Incorrect Guide to American History, and Meltdown), and a survey of Mises.org will introduce readers to such authors as Robert Higgs, Robert Murphy, and free-market/libertarian “revisionist” historians. What is being “revised” are the lies and misconceptions that plague the obsessively politically-correct history profession. Much of the writing of authors like these is on the Web, which has revolutionized the world of scholarship whereby the politically-correct “gatekeepers” of the Official Truth are routinely ignored and openly ridiculed.

Daily Bell: What other books and resources would you recommend to our readers?

Thomas DiLorenzo: My latest book project is tentatively entitled “False Virtue: The Myths that Transformed America From A Republic to an Empire.” It will be about what the federal government did with all that “virtue” after the Civil War, such as its war of extermination against the Plains Indians, subsidies to the transcontinental railroads, so-called “reconstruction,” the Spanish-American War, etc.

Daily Bell: Thank you for speaking with us. It has been most informative.

Thomas James DiLorenzo is an American economics professor at Loyola University Maryland. He is also a senior faculty member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and an affiliated scholar of the League of the South Institute, the research arm of the League of the South, and the Abbeville Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Virginia Tech. DiLorenzo has authored at least ten books, including The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Arch Enemy Betrayed the American Revolution – and What It Means for Americans Today, How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present, and Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe. DiLorenzo lectures widely, and is a frequent speaker at Mises Institute events.

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Arizona fires a shot across Washington’s bow

The criminals in Washington have dilly-dallied around and done little to enforce existing immigration law. The legislators and governor of Arizona decided that they would move ahead to stem the illegal immigration occurring across the Arizona-Mexico border. In the process, Arizona sent a message to Washington about Washington’s irrelevance.

Amazingly, President Obama referred to the signing of this STATE law as “irresponsibility by others.” Then, he stated that he had directed the Attorney General’s office to determine if this Arizona law was “legal.”

The temerity is breath-taking.

To begin this article, let’s review the most simple immigration laws.

Immigration law requires a non-citizen of the United States to apply for a visa in order to lawfully enter the USA. Once the visa is procured, the non-citizen is eligible to enter the USA during the term of the visa.

A non-citizen can also apply for his “green card,” the permanent resident card. Or, the non-citizen may file for US citizenship.

A permanent resident is someone who has been granted authorization to live and work in the United States on a permanent basis. As proof of that status, a person is granted a permanent resident card, commonly called a “green card.” You can become a permanent resident several different ways. Most individuals are sponsored by a family member or employer in the United States. Other individuals may become permanent residents through refugee or asylee status or other humanitarian programs. In some cases, you may be eligible to file for yourself.

Any person that enters the USA without a visa has committed a crime. I do not know of any exceptions to that law.

So…person in USA with visa…legal.

Person in USA without visa…criminal.

Can it get any clearer?

Law ENFORCEMENT only makes sense. Arizona’s new law requires police officers, “when practicable,” to detain people they reasonably suspect are in the country without authorization and to verify their status with federal officials, unless doing so would hinder an investigation or emergency medical treatment.

It also makes it a state crime (a misdemeanor) to not carry immigration papers. In addition, it allows people to sue local government or agencies if they believe federal or state immigration law is not being enforced.

Any of you readers that have traveled in ANY foreign country (except Canada) know that you are crazy not to carry your passport on your person at all times. Arizona is the first American state to demand that immigrants meet EXISTING federal requirements to carry identity documents legitimizing their presence on American soil. Yet the radical fringe here in America believes that it’s “Nazi” or “racial profiling” for law enforcement personnel to ask to see any person’s documents.

The leftists blather on about “racial profiling” like it’s a bad thing. But how many blue-eyed blondes are coming across the border from Mexico into Arizona? Of course cops are going to consider the ethnicity of persons suspected of violating immigration law. They have eyes and can see.

Cops could go in the other direction in order to appear that they are not racial profiling. They could begin setting up check points and checking the papers of EVERYONE, including 80-year-old white Grandmas, blacks and Asians. After all, isn’t that EXACTLY what the Transportation Safety Administration is doing at all America airports? Is that what the leftists want…everyone having to produce some government ID upon demand?

“Governor Brewer caved to the radical fringe,” a statement by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund said, predicting that the law would create “a spiral of pervasive fear, community distrust, increased crime and costly litigation, with nationwide repercussions.”

I’m throwing the bullshit flag on this play. The “increased crime” is nothing more than enforcing immigration law. Let’s say that Arizona had a legal statute against bank robbery that they had not enforced in the past. After today, they will enforce that statute. Simple enforcement will make the crime statistics APPEAR to shoot upward. Crime did not increase…enforcement did.

But consider this tempest in a teapot. The new Arizona law only makes violation of the law a misdemeanor…the same as a traffic ticket. I guess misdemeanors are crimes in the strictest sense, but no one would call you a criminal for your speeding tickets. So, I’m thinking some perspective is required here. If this is the “toughest immigration law” while only creating a misdemeanor offense, Arizona has perpetrated a very successful perception of toughness that exceeds reality.

The bottom line here is that it is Arizona’s responsibility to keep its own borders with Mexico. Governor Brewer announced a plan urging the federal government to post National Guard troops at the border. But I thought that the Arizona National Guard answered to the Governor first, not the President. If she thinks that troops are needed to secure the Arizona border, she should be the one signing the order.

And finally for you US Constitution fans, a cursory glance at the old document finds no authority to pass immigration law, anyway. Immigration law should be entirely the purview of each state. For any state that eventually secedes, immigration is just one more issue that will be addressed as that state becomes a new nation.

Secession is the hope for humanity. Who will be first?

DumpDC. Six Letters That Can Change History.

© Copyright 2010, Russell D. Longcore. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.