“Just say slavery.” “Slavery it is, sir!”
Thomas DiLorenzo on the role of tariffs in the troubles of 1861.
. . . when the Republican Party gained power in the late 1850s the top item on its agenda was to increase the average tariff rate from 15% [in 1857] to 32% and then to over 47% [in May 1860]. . . .
Abraham Lincoln was a lifelong protectionist and . . . at the 1860 Republican Party convention . . . won the support of the Pennsylvania and New York delegations (the two largest) by convincing them that no other candidate was more devoted to protectionism than he was.
There’s more, and it’s rather better written than DiLorenzo’s own book.
1861 and all that
Roderick Long writes in Shades of Grey (and Blue):
To their joint discredit, both Union and Confederacy waged war against the principle of free association. Southern rebels claimed the right to exit the Union, but hypocritically denied slaves the same right to exit the plantation.
President Lincoln, for his part, stated plainly that his “paramount Object” was “to save the Union,” and “not either to save or to destroy slavery.” If there had been no slaves, Lincoln would have sought to crush secession anyway. (And with conscripted troops!)
North and South alike, then, championed compulsory over free association. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Civil War was an unjust war on both sides.
with all due respect
This rant by Llewellyn Rockwell makes me curious: who was the last President to be booed while addressing Congress? I’d be surprised to hear that it has never happened, because the cult of the office was not so strong in the younger republic.
the way the future was
Who is this Bill Walker?
Fortunately, real life is too chaotic to predict via linear extrapolation. If Nero had tried to predict history with linear extrapolation, his picture of 2003 would have included: Imperial legions from the only world superpower carrying eagle emblems, marching into wars against minor nations in the Middle East, in order to build up the political careers of the powerful and unscrupulous. He would have predicted the Middle Easterners forming terrorist groups to retaliate in protest against the Imperial images and unveiled women defiling the Holy Lands. Nero could never have foreseen the modern world, with our ocean farms, Mars terraforming, and asteroid cities.
and then there’s the Rule of Five
Just found again, by chance, something that crossed my mind the other day. The author of The Bible Code responded thus in 1997 to the obvious criticism that you can find anything if you massage random data enough: “When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I’ll believe them.” So, for those who haven’t seen it already, or misplaced the bookmark: Assassinations Foretold in Moby Dick.
Learned Hand
Could that guy turn a phrase or what?
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. . . .
What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right . . . .
where was the battle of Waterloo?
A recent effort to measure the ignorance of college seniors included the question, “In what country was the Battle of Waterloo fought?” The ‘correct’ answer is Belgium, a state created 16 years later.
Waterloo is in Brabant, which at the time was (? or recently had been) part of the French Empire; before Boney’s conquests it was in the Austrian (and before that Spanish, and before that Burgundian) Netherlands.
Another question in the survey is “Do you have a favorite author?” I guess you’re illiterate if you can’t pick out just one. Among those listed was Christopher Stashass; I wonder whether it was the student or a clerk who misspelled Stasheff.