In his great new book The Problem with Lincoln, Tom DiLorenzo brought back an old memory. As Tom points out, Walter Berns, who taught political science at Cornell and then worked for the American Enterprise Institute, was one of the main figures urging us to worship Honest Abe. He quarreled with the main Lincoln idolater, Harry Jaffa, but I’m not going to go into what they fought about. Rather, I’d like to focus on an argument in Berns’s book Making Patriots (2006), to which Tom refers.

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Because the country could not stop for debt, he kindly stopped for the nation.

In The Communist Manifesto (1848) Karl Marx (1818–83) and Friedrich Engels (1820–95) predicted that capitalism would lead to the impoverishment of the laboring class. Why? Well, to raise profit on capital invested, Marx and Engels argued, entrepreneurs (the capitalists) would exploit the workers. They would reduce wages and worsen working conditions by, say, increasing working hours. From that viewpoint, Marx and Engels put forward an immiseration theory of capitalism.