"The myth of Lincoln cannot stand up under scrutiny," says Thomas DiLorenzo, "and after all these years, the word is finally getting out." Mises.org interviews DiLorenzo on his new book and its thesis that Lincoln's legacy was not freedom but the consolidated state. The book's high sales are as notable as the explosive controversy that has erupted about his thesis.
Philadelphia was the home not only of the first two federal banks, but it was the home of the two libertarian political economists who introduced and defended the independent treasury idea into the public consciousness, and created public pressure for its enactment.
The modern state, by its very nature, is incompetent, self-serving, mendacious, unresponsive, irresponsible, provocative, bellicose, and deadly. Above all, it is unaccountable. Just ask yourself what would happen to a private security firm that permitted a September 11 kind of disaster, even without foreknowledge. Let's just say it wouldn’t get a raise.
It was only a matter of time before the Feds realized that political capital could be created from the Enron mess. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is now investigating all electricity sellers for evidence of pricing schemes employed during California’s energy crisis. In true Soviet-like fashion, the FERC has issued a deadline by which suspected firms must “admit or deny” their complicity in engaging in spurious pricing schemes during the time period.
In his first inaugural address, Lincoln said he had no intention of disturbing slavery, and he appealed to all his past speeches to any who may have doubted him. But with the tariff it was different, notes Thomas DiLorenzo. Lincoln was willing to launch an invasion that would ultimately cost the lives of 620,000 Americans to prove his point.
By the 1890s, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Frick, Harriman, and many others amassed spectacular fortunes. To progressives and other redistributionists, their wealth, and the income inequality it implied, was unacceptable. An income tax, its advocates argued, was the fix.
What may be the more important factor in manufacturing future Enrons is the role of government in fostering the boom-bust cycle. Enron, then, is just one casualty of many--albeit the largest so far--of massive credit expansion and of manipulation of interest rates by the central bank.
Hey, accountants are people, too, and they're not very happy ones these days. Arthur Andersen’s accountants--not unjustifiably--think that they are unfairly being made the scapegoats for much of Enron’s unreported sins, and the consequences could be devastating for the accounting concern’s survival.
Pat Buchanan’s remarkable book expresses a distinctively nationalist thesis; and, as a conscientious reviewer in good standing, I shall of course say something about it. But it is on a subordinate part of this thesis that I propose to concentrate
Critics of Austrian economics often attack it as “armchair economics.” Instead of testable hypotheses, Mises and his followers offer us truths about the world based on allegedly self-evident axioms.
