Kendall, Rothbard, and the Limits of Liberty
About two years ago I was asked to contribute to a volume of essays on seminal 20th-century American conservative thinkers. My assignment was Willmoore Kendall, the “wild Yale don” (as Dwight Macdonald called him) known, among other things, for his defiantly populist commitment to majority rule. When Bill Buckley quipped that he’d rather be ruled by the first 400 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard, he was channeling his friend and preceptor Kendall.
The Dilemmas of American Conservatism, which includes my Kendall essay, will be out next month from the University of Kentucky Press. Meanwhile, out now from the Mises Institute is Strictly Confidential: The Private Volker Fund Memos of Murray N. Rothbard, which features Rothbard’s take on Kendall (along with such other notable figures as Charles A. Beard, George Kennan, and Eric Voegelin). As one might expect, Rothbard does not find Kendall’s ideas congenial: on the contrary, as Rothbard sees things, “Kendall has set forth the philosophy of tyranny cogently” and “the Kendallian doctrine is the Enemy.”
The Kendall material in Strictly Confidential comes from a 1956 report Rothbard wrote on the Yale professor’s Buck Hills Falls lectures, which previewed many themes that would subsequently be worked out in The Conservative Affirmation and various Kendall essays. Rothbard tends to agree with Kendall’s criticism of government by experts, which Kendall sees as characteristic of modern liberalism, but he is utterly opposed Kendall’s alternative, an unbridled majority rule — indeed, something that could be called majoritarian dictatorship. Rothbard considers Kendall’s thought to be even more antithetical to libertarianism than the ideas of Russell Kirk and the “New Conservatives” of the 1950s:
Kirk is the philosopher of old pre–Industrial Revolution, High Anglican England, the land of the squire, the Church, the happy peasant, and the aristocratic bureaucratic caste. He is essentially and basically antidemocratic. Kendall, on the contrary, is, as I have said, the patron of the lynch mob—he is an ur-democrat, a Jacobin impatient of any restraints on his beloved community. He hates bureaucracy, but not as we do, because it is tyrannical; he hates it because it has usurped control from the popular masses. He is the sort of person whom the [Clinton] Rossiter-[Peter] Viereck “new conservatives” are combating, for they are trying to defend the existent rule of the leftist bureaucracy against any populist mass upheaval. So they—the leftists—have shifted from mob whippers to soothing conservatives.
Kendall not only argues that a majority should get its way in politics; he goes so far as to argue that the Athenian public was right to condemn Socrates to death, indeed it had a duty to do so, for the alternative would have been either to accept Socrates’ teachings (which the Athenians were not prepared to do) or to treat the fundamental questions that Socrates raised as matters of indifference. Rothbard’s criticism extends Kendall’s doctrine ad absurdum, arguing that any innovation that would change a community must, on Kendall’s account, be forbidden by the majority. Otherwise the community would be surrendering its own identity to a subversive element.
How fair is all of this? Kendall was certainly no libertarian. But he was not the totalitarian that one might think from some of his more provocative statements. Rothbard does not draw out the connection between what he finds agreeable in Kendall — the criticism of modern liberalism as a covert form of domination over the public by an ideological elite — and the majoritarianism he finds objectionable. For Kendall, political power is a given; whatever scruples anyone might have about the use of force, and whatever written laws may be in place, ultimately somebody is holding a sword. Modern liberalism is not the tolerant, peaceful thing it claims to be because its political order is still based on conformity and force; the sword is wielded by a expert class that disguises its dominance over everyone else with empty language about rights. (To the extent that anyone actually believes that language, even within the expert class, they are putting their own necks under the sword’s edge.)
Various political thinkers have argued that different classes, castes, or factions should wield the sword. Kendall, however, sees a straightforward categorical division: either the majority wields the sword, or some minority, a special interest of some sort, wields it. Kendall, following his interpretation of Locke and the American political system, believes that the majority should wield power. (Later, Kendall’s views will become more complex: he continues to hew to majoritarianism, but he becomes critical of Locke and draws a distinction between different kinds of majority rule — a bad, plebiscitary kind, and a good, structured kind that he identifies with the best parts of the American tradition.)
Kendall would see Rothbard’s idea that everyone should adhere to a framework of liberty derived from property rights (including self-ownership) as irrelevant to political theory. Kendall also might not like the Rothbardian credo, but his personal preferences can be separated from his philosophy, and it seems to me the more important Kendallian philosophical point is that no ideology of rights or rearrangement of institutions eradicates power from human life. In a Kendallian view, Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism can just as fairly be called a dictatorship of the property owners as Kendall’s majoritarianism can be called a dictatorship of the majority. The “dictator” in either system need not be sadist; indeed, he could be an enlightened despot, full of the milk of human kindness and absolutely determined to harm no one. But ultimately someone is holding the sword, and it is the sword-holder’s disposition that determines how much liberty or license other people may have. Kendall is not totally indifferent to liberty: he does, however, believe that ordinary people will have the best judgment of what liberty should mean and that ordinary people as a whole will tend to have less tyrannical impulses than any minority faction.
In this, Kendall more or less explicitly affirms what he considers to be John Locke’s “latent premise” — Locke can be a majoritarian and a believer in natural rights, according to Kendall in John Locke and the Doctrine Of Majority-Rule, because he tacitly assumes that the majority can be trusted to abide by those rights. Kendall and Rothbard are both Lockeans — even the later Kendall, who repudiates Locke himself, still retains some “Lockean” characteristics — but of very different species: Rothbard emphasizes a natural-rights Locke, Kendall a majoritarian Locke.
There are plenty of problems with majoritarianism, beginning with the question of just how “majoritarian” it actually is. Isn’t talk about majority rule just a disguise for rule by another kind of elite, much as talk about human rights and tolerance is? I don’t recall Kendall tackling this question head on, but I suspect that beyond whatever confidence he puts in democratic political machinery (which was sometimes quite a bit, especially where the U.S. Constitution was concerned), he might also see a strong cultural component in the desire and ability of a government to express the popular will. His interest in Rousseau (who seems also to have such a thing in mind) suggests as much. (Kendall translated and wrote introduction for The Social Contract and The Government of Poland.) In any case, there is plenty of cause for skepticism about the merits of majority rule, but it’s worth keeping an open mind about whether Kendall’s absolute majoritarianism is as incompatible with broad view of liberty as Rothbard thought.
An anarcho-capitalist society, after all, might well decide not to tolerate communists proselytizing on private property. (And if there is no public property, that means not tolerating communist speech at all.) Indeed, Hans-Hermann Hoppe insists on this point in Democracy: The God That Failed:
As soon as mature members of society habitually express acceptance or even advocate egalitarian sentiments, whether in the form of democracy (majority rule) or of communism, it becomes essential that other members, and in particular the natural social elites, be prepared to act decisively and, in the case of continued nonconformity, exclude and ultimately expel these members from society. In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one’s own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society.
Thomas Jefferson, of course, notoriously wanted to ban certain Tory books, including Hume’s History of England, from the University of Virginia’s libraries. The point I would make is that in any community, whether democratic or anarcho-capitalist or what have you, somebody is going to be drawing lines dividing permissible opinions from speech acts that endanger the society order. One might choose to be far more latitudinarian than Kendall, Hoppe, or Jefferson, but don’t confuse latitudinarianism with the belief that one’s own limits upon expression aren’t really limits at all. Liberals, Kendall and Rothbard would agree, say they are committed to complete free speech when in practice they are not; but more than that, even someone who sincerely believes in total expressive freedom has probably just failed to recognize his own innate beliefs about where limits should be drawn.
The question of what limits should exist is both distinct from and intimately connected to the question of who should rule. Only the “ruler,” in the abstract, is able to establish the limits (and the conversely the freedoms) that he wants to see in society. The questions that Kendall raises, and the sometimes extreme form in which he poses them, should be helpful to anyone who wants to think seriously about political philosophy. They are questions that even a Rothbardian must confront, even if the answers he comes up with are very different from Kendall’s.
Great piece today, Daniel ! As usual you give much food for thought. I knew both Rand and Rothbard well back in the 60s
and they both combined some great philosophy with the most numbskull of cult followers. Hoppe is a serious head case. I
have his books and before I stopped LRC I followed his apriori
fundamentalism for way too many years. He recently declared himself a Kantian in a monograph on Austrian economics in which he defended Rothbard’s extreme apriorism. As Tom Palmer of CATO once pointed out referring
to Hoppe’s criteria for allowing immigration to the US he (Hoppe) would not have been illegible to come here ! I can’t
stand Palmer and CATO but he was right on Hoppe.
Hoppe wrote that Rand got Kant wrong which she didn’t.
She crudely but accurately defined the essence of Kant’s philosophy in For The New Intellectual.
Rothbard had a lot of nasty comments in those private reviews
which I saw back in the early 70s through a mutual friend at a
Menlo Park thinktank. He tried to sabotage Thomas Szasz’s
The Myth Of Mental Illness and James J. Martin’s two volume
American Liberalism and World Politics, 1931-41. Though
he hypocritically endorsed the Martin opus for public consumption.
I find myself totally disagreeing with Rothbard and Kendall.
The only prohibition on speech should be against physical threats as the current law properly recognizes.
Did Rothbard actually say that there would be limits on free speech on your own property? You quoted Hoppe for that and even if he was one of Rothbard’s disciples I’m not sure it’s fair to say the former endorsed the latter’s viewpoint.
As a anarchist I’d be opposed to any sort of limit to what you can say on your own property. If no one (literally no one) in a completely private society wanted to hear your views on communism I don’t see why you should be allowed to talk about it on their property, but I can’t see why they’d stop you from saying whatever you’d like on your own.
But if you don’t OWN any property then you have no rights, eh ? Another good reason to oppose anarchism.
Hoppe is as religious a Rothbardian Cultist as has ever come down the pike. He would no more deviate from Rothbard than
Peikoff from Rand. TRUE BELIEVER. And who needs them ?
“But if you don’t OWN any property then you have no rights, eh ?”
You always own yourself.
You always own yourself, but that self has to be located somewhere in space, which brings up the question of who owns the ground and decides what rules apply there. Here’s what Rothbard says:
The point that anarcho-capitalists can raise here is that in a sufficiently free market, where landholders are competing with one another for tenants and customers, those owners who grant broad free-speech privileges will be more successful. I think it’s entirely possible that things might work out that way; I could also see them working out differently. The interesting thing for political theory is that rules are still coming from some authority, which has powers (in this case, based on property) that other people may not have.
Interesting article and comments. Regarding the idea that there is always some type of authority in every society and that this leads to asymmetrical power relationships, I’m reminded of the claims by Marxists that political power and economic power are essentially the same. My reply to this is that economic relationships are voluntary, in that they can be dissolved at any time, by either party simply withdrawing their consent. This is not possible with political relationships, where participation is not voluntary, but rather mandatory. Thus, if one finds that the relationship is intolerable, there is no recourse.
This is why private con jobs, like that perpetrated by Bernie Madoff, are not as bad as government schemes like Social Security. After all, if one of Madoff’s “investors” realized what was going on, he was free to walk away and at least cut his losses. The same would be true in an anarchist society. Those who did not like the covenant would not be forced to join it, and even after joining, would be free to leave if they were unhappy with it. They would not be forced to abide by rules that they had never agreed to, as they are in the status quo.
Finally, with regard to the concern that in an anarchist society one would not be free unless one owned property, this is a situation that is not only not unique to anarchy, but is actually worse in a statist society. After all, what does “ownership” mean, other than the ultimate authority to make decisions concerning that which is “owned”? In other words, in any political system, whoever has such ultimate authority over a particular piece of property is the true de facto “owner” of that piece of property. In a statist society, however, that ultimate authority always rests with the state. The state is the de facto “owner” of all the land, meaning that no one is ever truly free, regardless of their physical location.
Let me suggest two principles. The first is that “We can own what we make, but not what someone else makes.” From this it follows we cannot own things like land, but only allocate the use of land. We can own what our labor brings forth from the land, but not the land itself, since we cannot make it. But of all the things we cannot own, the first and foremost is ourselves, since no one can make themselves. We can (and must) own our own actions (that is liberty) and our own personalities (to a degree). Each of us is called into being by the ready-made community of the family from which we receive gifts of love, language, culture, etc. Our task is to make good use of these gifts, and pass them on.
The second principle is that while small decisions can be made for all by a bare majority, great decisions (such as going to war or permitting abortion) can only be made by a broad consensus. By “great decision,” I mean mainly a great departure from the received tradition. Tradition is the accumulated wisdom of how to live in the world, a knowledge that exceeds any particular person or generation. Of course, it is not static, but it is (or should be) stable. As the world changes, which it always does, the tradition changes, but slowly and cautiously.
From this second principle, political theory must aim at achieving a consensus on the big issues, while leaving the small ones to simple deliberation and voting.
John, your Georgist proposal won’t do. Technically speaking we didn’t create the land or the airwaves or the oceans or anything else in nature, so by your logic no one could ever own anything. You correctly add that we didn’t make ourselves, so self-ownership is out too. We must live to serve
others, ad nauseum.
What consensus can you have on abortion or any other individual right ? You either believe in the concept or you don’t.
Many of us think the only purpose of government is to recognize our rights, not to create them.
Now you are rehabiltating Rothbard and Rand big time !
Daniel’s caveat in response to the standard complacent
assumptions in response to Mad Doc is well taken and I never saw them properly addressed by Rothbard.
Langa’s comments on social security are out to lunch.
I started getting it this year and the checks arrive like
clockwork the fourth Wednesday of every month.
I did resent the forced savings but the comparison with
a master criminal like Madoff is beyond absurd. How do you
walk away when you have been completely cleaned out ?
Ask Elie Wiesel or the American Jewish Congress, in these
cases couldn’t have happened to more deserving folk but it
still shouldn’t have happened.
Michael, Exactly. We live to serve others or for ourselves; that is the basic human choice. We are the recipients of a series of gifts, and our choice is to pass them along or to waste them. That’s it.
I think the problem you will have is rooting “rights” in something other than the political order, since to have a right, someone else must recognize it, and there must be a state to protect it. The “natural” order conveys no rights; only the supernatural order can do this, and only by recognizing a supernatural order can we be moved to recognize anybody else’s rights. The “right” to an abortion is an assertion of one’s right to “control one’s body.” But can this be correct?
The crucial discussion is not so much about rights as about obligations. Without a world of obligations, none of us would have survived childhood; indeed, we would not have survived our first day, even assuming we got to make that far. But in an age of individualism, the conversation about obligations has been banished
And once again, you are correct: we didn’t create the airwaves or the land; how then can we assert a “natural” ownership of them? Were will you root this “right”? And if gov’t has no other purpose than protecting this right, how can it not be a political right, as Aquinas (and the entire Christian tradition) asserts?
[...] McCarthy for The American Conservative discussed the issues at heart of the upcoming book, The Dilemmas of American Conservatism, and connected the thinking of Willmoore Kendall with that of Murray [...]
@John:
I like that you are going back to Aquinas, but you’ll understand if I am a bit hesitant to just take that at face value, given the difference of opinion on Aquinas’ view of government. I do agree that rights must be founded on obligations; what he says in Contra Impugnantes pretty much lays that out neat and shiny, along with his writings on the “ius”. But in Contra Impugnantes, one notes, this leads to his positing of public societies requiring a government to ensure the overall common good, so the Libertarians are going to object right there, at least the Rothbardian ones. Moreover, at least in his example of the grain merchant arriving knowingly before a shipment of grain the famine-stricken market does not know about, he certainly goes against the Socialist dictates and seems to go against the top-down Distributist dictates regarding the way business is to be conducted “justly”. (I am unsure whether it goes against both Schumacher distributists; I know that it goes against those whom Mises criticized as “Christian Socialists.” Whether Chester-Belloc falls into that latter category, I am unaware; and I am more of the mind that Belloc does than Chesterton.)
In any case, though, the foundation of rights in obligations must be respected. There is no other actual basis from which man’s nature is able to reveal itself; there’s a step missing between our nature as men and Locke’s natural rights claims.
I would not take Mises’s characterization of any philosophy at face value. Nor do I know what you mean by “top-down distributism”; I am unfamiliar with the term, and I thought I was aware of every variation, more or less. Nor do I see how the example of the grain merchant applies, especially since Aquinas himself was ambiguous on the morality of his actions. And I don’t know where you are locating the difference of opinion on Aquinas’s view of gov’t. I haven’t addressed those issues, so I am confused as to what the dispute, if any, concerns.
The question here concerns the origin of property rights. We are big on asserting this right, even to the point of asking the gov’t to defend it by force and violence. But we are reluctant to specify the origin, nature, and limitations of the right. That seems a strange hiatus, don’t you think?
Michael,
I’m glad you are enjoying your Social Security checks, but what of those younger than yourself, who are currently paying into the system, but will never see a dime in return? Don’t you feel any guilt about living off these people? Or do you believe that such a Ponzi scheme can “work” indefinitely, without resorting to outright theft? If so, you are suffering from some serious economic delusions. Oh, and you’re right that it’s absurd to compare a petty thief like Madoff to the criminal geniuses in DC, who steal far more in a month than Madoff ever dreamed of stealing in his entire life.
John,
Libertarian scholars such as Rothbard and Hans Hoppe have actually devoted considerable effort to specifying the origin, nature, and limitations of property rights.
Incidentally, Rothbard also offered a devastating critique of Georgism, thoroughly eviscerating it from not only a theoretical perspective, but a practical one as well.
It’s available at: http://mises.org/rothbard/georgism.pdf
Ianga, what you call “devastating,” I call puerile. Particularly nonsensical is that the claim that “A 100 percent tax on rent would cause the capital value of all land to fall promptly to zero.” Would that were true. But it is not. Economic rent would still be collected, just now by the so-called “landlord.” You cannot eliminate the economic rent of land; you can only change the rent-collector. there are places with Georgist taxes (Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong). Guess what? The value didn’t go to zero.
Rothbard once again reveals his ignorance of economics and of ownership. If he were anywhere near correct, these places should be in chaos. They are actually quite successful.
The problem with social security has nothing to do with it being a ponzi scheme or making the young pay for the old. That’s the only way it can work. The old must eat the bread of the young. There is no other solution. In the past, social security meant having a lot of money or having a lot of children. And as few had the former, most had the later.
So The problems are other wise. One is social, the other is prudential. The prudential problem is that “old” is now a mighty young 62. Surely, people of my age are not decrepit and should require no support from the young. But the real problem is social. What used to be a part of normal intergenerational relationships now becomes mediated by the gov’t. Now, you no longer need a lot of money or a lot of children to retire. In fact, the big winners are those who had few or no children of their own, but rely on others to have sufficient children to support them.
John, your reasoning proves too much which means it proves exactly nothing at all. We don’t have to create a resource to own it, we merely have to use our intelligence to transform it.
By your logic, 99.99% of humanity would starve and we would live in a perpetual primitive state of nature. Your dichotomy of serving ourselves or others is totally false because by serving ourselves we serve others. Adam Smith demonstrated this 300 years ago as have Rand and Rothbard since many times.
Georgist economics regarding land has been a total failure every place it’s been tried. See Reisman’s Capitalism and Rothbard’s Man, Economy and State. The three East Asian tiger states have suffered greatly from their state capitalism in economics and are all nasty little dictatorships that rely on the semi-free portions of their economies to salvage the statist disasters of their anti-land ownership policies.
Private property ownership dramatically reduces land rents,
see Capitalism by George Reisman, pages 310-316. The book is so large that it’s 1,000 atlas sized pages would equal 2,000 pages in a regular book.
Obligations are subsidiary to rights. You endorse the altruist-collectivist-statist view here without anything other than mere assertions. For you, others are supreme but WHY ? Because
they are others ? Altruism derives from Otherism. To say a scholar like Rothbard in Man, Economy And State knows nothing of economics is like saying Newton or Einstein know nothing about physics !!!!!!!!!!!! Rothbard has forgotten more
about economics than George or you ever knew.
Langa, your predictions of the next generation not receiving social security have been a proven failure for 70 years and in my case I’m only getting out what I’ve put in since 1963.
The earlier social security generations may have been welfare beneficiaries but that’s not true now. Long range it may be a different story. I’m not for the program but your Madoff analogy is wrong. Unlike Madoff the social security program IS paying out to everyone, not bankrupting millions to benefit a very few.
John,
With regard to Mises, nor would I. A little defining of terms would probably make things more clear. When I said “top-down distributism”, I meant that theory of distributism meant to keep business small through direct government intervention, the idea that government should chop the top bits off of the tallest flowers, so to speak. This theory often leads to a ridiculous trust in government skill as able to replace the ability of large businesses to meet demand for even non-luxuries. I do not think this would necessarily be your particular understanding of distributism, mind you; this is why I mentioned Schumacher, who espouses what I think to be the more reasonable idea of what I call “bottom-up distributism”, in which entrepreneurs themselves are given legitimate incentives for their businesses to remain at a competitively small size. I am much more a fan of this idea. Mises, while a bigot and too quick to castigate, was I think correct in referring to top-down distributism as Christian socialism, at least in many of its manifestations (if not in all.)
I like the latter form, in which smallness is incentivized, because it preserves free enterprise without compromising on good anthropological principles. I am not a libertarian, I should add; I am a Catholic, and if my politics were described under the tired old labels, they’d be conservative. I am also, as it happens, a student of Aquinas. The difference of opinion I mentioned was the question of just how much Aquinas would dictate the government could justly intervene in the modern economic context; some have said he supports top-down distributism, in that the common good would be served by all businesses being small, to which others respond that in fact there are some ways in which the common good is served by precisely the opposite, many large businesses; others have said he would support a bottom-up distributism, since in that framework the government acts organically to encourage good associations, which as he says are the frame of communications, which are the basis of societies of any kind. Critics of this claim, from what I’ve heard, say that this is not enough to overcome a situation in which businesses are already large enough to stifle competition, and thus acts against prudence, because it is not enough. Both of these are concerned ultimately with the character of the “ius” concerning private property.
Thing about the right to private property is, it is already pretty neatly defined by Aquinas, in that it’s grounded in obligation and the justice of an action. And those, at least in Catholic moral teaching, are pretty nicely sewn up. The question is how much a government ought to do, and that is forever grounded in prudential concerns. How do we assess prudential concerns? By how well the action is expected to WORK. This is where the eggheads with the number sheets step in, and then after the libertarians and the conservatives stop bickering, we figure out whose solution is the most effective, both in terms of efficiency AND in terms of allowing human beings to act according to their nature.
Clear enough, I hope?
Speaking of assertions, I will assert that I wish we could “suffer” like the Asian Tigers are. And the assertion that private property “reduces” land rent is nonsense, and if that is what Reisman is saying, then he is not talking about a free market. Land rents will always tend to equalize returns from any parcel, so long as there is a market in land. This is well known. The difference in rents comes not from improvements, for the same improvements built on different parcels of land will return different rents. Take an identical set of building plans, and build them in Dallas, Seattle, New York, and Beijing. They will have a completely different rent. Since the building are the same, the difference can only come from the location. If Reisman or Rothbard dispute that, then they know nothing of economics.
Writing a lot doesn’t prove you know anything. And I haven’t said anything about altruism, so I’d appreciate it if you don’t attribute to me things I haven’t said.
What you need to do, John, is read Reisman’s argument here because I can only summarize it. George was totally wrong on the land question which he plagiarized from Spencer and instead of your absurd caricatures you need to read Reisman and Rothbard in the original. The difference is NOT from the locational BUT from the demand. I would have thought this too
elementary to emphasize but with today’s intellectual devolution, nothing can be taken for granted.
Writing a lot DOES prove a lot if you know what your writing about and you don’t know Mises, Rothbard and Reisman because you haven’t gotten off your duff to read them.
Thomas, your verbosity is as clear as dark mud. Capice ?
Pardon me for trying, Michael. Perhaps I would have had better luck if, like you, I had one argument, which consisted entirely of “my point is correct because you need to read so-and-so.” Then perhaps I could avoid verbosity.
As it happens, I have read Smith, in depth, both the Wealth of Nations and the Theory of Moral Sentiments. Perhaps you might be familiar with this quote: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” Smith was not such a fool as to say ONLY what you claim, that “by serving ourselves we serve others”, and leave it at that, because sometimes the way we serve ourselves doesn’t help others at ALL (if I kill an innocent man, it isn’t helping anyone), and sometimes by helping others we serve ourselves (if I give my workers reasonable wages during a bad economy, it’s incentive for them to stay during the bad times.) And (here’s a shocker!) sometimes the free market, left to itself, can HURT people!
Now I can anticipate precisely what you are going to say. “You need to read Rothbard, you are an idiot and not worth my time, you probably still wet the bed when it comes to economics” etc. Surprise number 2: I’ve READ Rothbard. And Mises. I went to school with David Friedman’s kids. My mom worked with Milton Friedman on CA school choice. The first economic work I read was Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, and I have read it many times since. You might say I am intimately familiar with libertarian, Austrian economics. So when you say that Rothbard is so great, I have two words for you: contract law.
According to Rothbard’s big fat theory of everything, there can be perfect abrogation of future labor contracts, but not goods contracts, and society will still work. Funny that such a genius should make such an elemental mistake as to forget that every goods contract is a labor contract, and every labor contract is a future labor contract. And since contract law is the backbone of a society, his society can’t work. Yet every two days I am told by another wild-eyed Mises Institute scout that Rothbard is the greatest thing since sliced bread…this is my problem with you guys, that you think that if ANYONE disagrees with your beloved idol, it’s because of a devolution in education, and not because of the not very hard to justify possibility that someone has not only read him, but rejected his ideas.
I realize, of course, that you are addressing John. But whereas he has argued with cogency and poise so far, you immediately released the claws, and so I am far more sympathetic to his point of view at the moment simply on the basis of TONE.
So, yeah, capisci.
Michael, George was not “plagairizing” Spencer only, he was “plagiarizing” Smith, Ricardo, Mill, Marx, Marshall, and a dozen others. The land tax comes from Smith. George did not innovate, he merely placed the question in terms that were accessible to the general public. The question of rent occupied the 19th century economists. The problem was “solved” by the neoclassicists by simply treating land as another form of capital, which manifestly it is not.
As for reading Reisman, well, I have a lot to read. I have published three book reviews just this month, and read others I didn’t review. I usually select authors based on whether the people who do read them talk sense or nonsense. But the people who read Reisman, like Woods, speak nothing but nonsense. If I meet a sensible person who has read Reisman and recommends him, I might read him; as things stand, I find it easy to resist the temptation.
test
John, George did get his premise from an insane essay of Spencer’s that claimed that if we allowed private property in land the property owners could order everyone to get off the earth and go to the moon or another planet. There were other
influences as you say but this was a main one.
I could care less about your self-importance in publishing book reviews, what I recommend is that you read a book or at least the pages wherein (310-16) Reisman deals with George.
Rothbard also demolished him in volume two of Man, Economy and State but Reisman is even more comprehensive. Your ad hominem about the people who recommend books means nothing cognitively.
Rather than reinvent the wheel I’ve referred you to sources
and if your too scared to check them out that’s not my problem. Land is another form of capital LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE.There is nothing special or sacred or “godgiven” about it. Land is what we make of it and the market is the only objective test here, again like everything else.
Thomas, like all bad writers you are verbose and say nothing.
That quote from Smith does not in the least subtract from his general thesis in Wealth that those who work for themselves are the ones who benefit others. Moral Sentiments is a sloppy
altruist ethics work which adds nothing to his reputation, it merely restates the traditional discredited Judaeo-Christian-
Kantian self-sacrifice ethics and it’s not the work that made him famous. Leftists like Chomsky love to quote what you quoted but all it means is that Smith was opposed to cartels,
which can only prosper by government edict. Which is why I always recommend Mises, Rothbard and even more so Reisman’s Capitalism to economic ignoramuses or even honest people wanting to learn about economics.
Thomas, you give no indication of knowing anything about Austrian Economics and I’m totally unimpressed with the Chicago School and both Friedmans, much less Junior’s kids.
Neither you nor John have argued at all, much less with cogency. I have briefly refuted both of you AND more importantly have given sources. In a free society of course you can terminate labor contracts. The labor contracts since the New Deal have been a form of government coercion and to say that you can’t terminate contracts implies one of the parties is a slave to the other. The only harm on the free market comes from force and fraud. And if you refuse to reduce wages during a depression then you only prolong the depression and put more people out of work. See America’s Great Depression by Rothbard which PROVES how Hoover’s
policies in urging employers to keep wages up was a main cause in prolonging and worsening the depression, later much aggravated by FDR’s even more statist policies.
Goods contracts can be terminated by paying a penalty
AND Rothbard is not opposed to contract law. Read Power
And Market addendum to Man, Economy And State and
read The Ethics Of Liberty AND his two volume work titled
Classical Economics which demonstrates there were many
other laissez-faire economic thinkers BEFORE Smith.
Your spelling of capice or capise doesn’t sound right but
while I am knowledgable in economics, philosophy, history,
psychology, political theory and more that doesn’t extend to Italian.
Traditional Judaeo-Chrstian ethics are not Kantian, they’re Aristotelian, which is almost completely different from Kantian.
You are a very strange man. You accuse me of being verbose, and then you write a longer, more rambling post to try countering everything.
As if it matters at all whether I say anything (since you manifestly aren’t bothering to read anything anyone says honestly) what I SAID was that Rothbard’s contract law scheme DOES NOT WORK IN ANY WAY, not that he is “opposed” to contract law.
If I waste any more time arguing with you, Michael, it will have been too much time.
Michael, George’s sources are not up for debate. They are well known. Anybody who has read George knows his sources, because he discusses them. Anybody who gets their knowledge of George from six pages in an obscure economist does not. If you want to know about George, then read something by him, say Progress and Poverty. If you don’t, then don’t. But don’t pretend an expertise on the matter because you have read six pages from Reisman.
You demonstrate, once again, why I have no interest in reading Reisman. His followers tend to be instant experts in subjects they have not bothered to study beyond what he says. He seems to attract a certain type, a type that gets its information on difficult subjects only from allied sources. In this age of the internet, when information is so freely available, we SHOULD be able to look at diverse sources; most don’t. And it shows.
Rothboard proves nothing, even if you put it in caps. Wages dropped in the depression.
If you think land is capital, then you don’t know what capital is.
John, you have demonstrated once more your great fear of
reading Reisman and I can understand why. Land in a civilized state IS capital. In an uncivilized state there is no capital. Reisman is not an obscure economist, he’s the leading disciple of Mises and the Austrian School since Rothbard’s death. His 1,000 page atlas-sized book is equivalent to 2,000 pages in a regular and it is possible to
treat the essence of George’s Single Tax in 12 regular pages.
I’ve read many critiques as well as George himself so your
presumptions are off as usual. Everything George wrote is up for debate and I caught you ignoring a main source and I
never denied the other sources existed. Don’t bother to write me anymore, your wasting my time and time is capital too.
Thomas, the Judaeo-Christian ethics are NOT based on Aristotle. I ‘ve read his complete works plus the Bible and you
are simply wrong. You would benefit from Peikoff’s History Of
Western Philosophy from the Ayn Rand Bookstore. It’s very
long and well spoken and worth the steep price on either cassettes or cd’s.
My post was longer than usual but not in the least rambling.
I was trying to do justice to your assertions.
Your second sentence is pure self-projection.
Your statement on Rothbard’s contract law is flatly wrong but thanks for your clarification.
Your last sentence sums up my view on you entirely.
Michael, everything is up for debate–by people who know what they are talking about. I know we are all raised to believe that everybody has a right to their opinions, which is true in some legal sense. But only informed opinions are worth debating. It is not a courtesy which extends to people who get their philosophy from the Ayn Rand Bookstore; even Rothbard knew better than to take Rand seriously.
Land is not capital. Capital is reproducible and consumed in the process of production; land is neither. And time is not capital.
And no, Christianity did not wait for the 18th century to find a basis for its moral views.
Dan’s characteristically excellent post raises two issues. The first of these is whether Rothbard ignored Kendall’s point that some group in society must wield power. I don’t think so: to the contrary, he had strong populist leanings himself and, like Kendall, much preferred control by the people to rule an an intellectual elite. Rothbard’s criticism of Kendall was that the choices of the majority, even if they reflect Kendall’s “deliberate sense of the community”, are subject to evaluation by moral and political theory. Libertarianism, in his view, is not a mere personal preference but the outcome of correct reasoning about ethics.
This brings us to the second issue. Dan notes that a libertarian society is consistent with intolerance, e.g., if all property owners refused entrance to communists. One could quibble about the example—in my opinion, libertarian property rights don’t allow someone to be totally excluded from any place to stand; but the principal point I wish to emphasize can be made if we take the example as it stands. It is quite true, as Jerry Cohen long ago emphasized, that a libertarian society is consistent with certain morally bad outcomes. Suppose, e.g., that no one in it was willing to give charity. But libertarianism does not purport to be a complete theory of a moral society. It is rather a position about the conditions under which force is justifiable. For more on this distinction, besides Rothbard’s works, I’d recommend the discussion in the relevant section of Bob Nozick’s Invariances.
To John, as an inducement to read Reisman on Henry George, Reisman was a friend for over forty years of Bob Andelson, one of the foremost Georgists, and Andelson, who was by the way a dear friend of mine, respected his thought highly.
David, As I say, there are lots of things to read, and I am most enticed to read an author when his readers talk sense. But when they consistently talk nonsense, I suspect there are better uses of my time. For people who believe that land is capital, or that we can place a moral society here, and an economic society over there, and somehow it will all work out, well, I leave them to their beliefs. I have already suffered through a 1,000 page tome on “Human Action” that managed to avoid the subject entirely. I don’t think another 2,000 pages from his student is likely to improve this.
Thomas, I completely missed your “top-down” reply, some posts back. The key issue of distributism is not size, but ownership, and its relation to work. One of the largest corporations in the world, The Mondragon Cooperative Corporation of Spain, was founded 60 years ago by distributists, and boasts 100,000 worker-owners.
You are quite correct that some things are serviced best by small, and some by large, a point made by Chesterton. There would be a variety of types of businesses and models. But there would not be a few owners and a lot of dependents. That’s the one model that is excluded.
Thomas believed in property as a legal right, not a natural one, which is consistent with the view of the Fathers. As Thomas puts it: “According to Thomas,
Community of goods is ascribed to the natural law, not that the natural law dictates that all things should be possessed in common and that nothing should be possessed as one’s own: but because the division of possessions is not according to the natural law, but rather arose out of human agreement which belongs to the positive law… Hence the ownership of possessions is not contrary to the natural law, but an addition thereto devised by human reason. (ST II-II, 66, 3)”
If you have not read Peikoff’s previous work such as Objectivism:The Philosophy Of Ayn Rand and The Ominous
Parallels OR have not listened to his four bound volumes in the casstte version of his history of western philosophy, by what grounds could you dismiss the audio series because it is sold by the Ayn Rand Institute ??????????
I have also spent many thousands of dollar purchasing many philosophy & history cassettes from The Teaching Company
and found them to be markedly inferior to Peikoff’s product.
I’m not saying they were bad but Peikoff’s is much more in depth.
Land IS reproducible as those of us who live by the San Francisco Bay can testify and even kids know that time is money and money is capital. Land certainly is consumed in the process of production as any farmer can tell you. Land
is a capital factor when acted upon by human thought and that thought is translated into labor.
Well, if only “informed” opinions are worth debating then why are you still debating ? Your opinions are manifestly uninformed on the topics that we have been debating.
Your last sentence is a total nonsequitur.
My point is that the Judaic-Christian ethics are much closer to Kant than Aristotle EXCEPT that Kant is even more extreme in self-abnegation.
Actually Rothbard took Rand very seriously and you should see the letter he wrote to her about Atlas Shrugged.
He basically agreed with Objectivism and it was the more the
cultish atmosphere created by the Brandens that he opposed. They only disagreed over whether there should be a government at all and I can see both arguments as very powerful but lean slightly towards Rand here. I have disagreed with Rand on her support of Ford, Nixon, Israel, noncombatant casualties, the space program, her indifference to gun control, window display censorship, compulsory jury service and a host of other issues that contradict her philosophy. Some of my disagreement with Rothbard was earlier stated here before the Georgist nonissue herring was introduced.
John , your arrogance is exceeded only by your self-made blindness.
David Gordon’s statements are typically very helpful. I have respected great intellectuals such as Henry George and James J. Martin, who were Georgists but not for that reason but for their great historical revisionism just I respect George on tariffs and other non-single tax statism.
I have certainly had differences on foreign policy with Ayn Rand Institute and the Israeli-phile warmongers that run it
BUT that doesn’t mean they don’t also do some great work too. But to John M. this is a nuance that goes right over his head.
Ralph Raico, a protege of Rothbard, had a great defense of Rand against some Rothbard Cultists at the lewrockwell.com
website a few months back. Readers should check it out.
Oh, I love it when the Austrian factions start calling each other names. You boys have at.
John, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
One is brought to consider the fact that if a person has read the original source, they ought to be able to rebut that source sufficiently themselves with argument, not rely on the reference to what others have impugned as an authority…unless, perhaps, that person is afraid that his position is in error? Reliance on the argument from authority, when that authority is not divine revelation, is evidence of the weakest of understandings.
John:
That distinction between natural and legal rights really hits home with me. I remember my discussion of Locke in undergrad eventually coming to the understanding that Locke thinks property is a natural right, one which man possesses without a social framework; this always seemed to me distinctly silly, since then one could conceivably make the prudential judgement to self-enforce one’s “right” to land which one does not, in fact, either have a greater claim to or require in any sense. If property is a LEGAL right, then it makes miles more sense, because then one actually has the right framework to address one’s ability to “own” land in any sense.
I’m thinking here of the beginning of society. In the first place, a family, being as it is a private society unto itself, if it is not part of a public society, may claim land (not belonging to another justly) in which to live, and legally, because they are then the legal authority. When a public society later gets involved, that claim is placed under a common good, by the willing association of the private societies; this also makes sense. Ultimately you have a higher public society of societies; this constitutes the common good of all, and becomes the ultimate land authority; and as long as the actions of those public societies are just, then this makes perfect sense. Thus from beginning to end land claims make sense on such a model.
In Locke’s view, we’ve got this idea that one dude with a rifle can stake a claim as big as he may enrich, and then when he’s decided to stop pointing his rifle at the people near him they might form a society wherein he hands his rifle over to a bossman. Now I don’t recall seeing how any society ever started with the voluntary handing over of one’s will to a government, but this seems to be the conspiracy Locke and Rothbard both see; myself, the idea that families associated makes more sense by miles.
Thomas, you can’t read any better than you can think.
I did briefly refute the premise of the Georgist view but
rather than reinvent the wheel arguing with religious
Georgian fanatics, as I know from 50 years of empirical
observation, I simply referred the interested readers to
a more comprehensive analysis, which being True Believers,
you both simply refuse to read. Fine. End of debate.
By the way, I NEVER used the argument from authority,
another red herring or nonsequitur on your part.
I wrote, to repeat myself, that if readers wished a comprehensive treatment of the subject then I cited where they could find it. It’s called giving sources and documentation instead of the mindless You Sez, I Sez.
Your remarks about “divine revelation” are very revealing
as to what your epistemology and you have pronounced
outside reason, logic and facts.
The best work on the origins of the state is the 19th century
German economist, Franz Oppenheimer, The State.
There was no “family” origin of the state. It was simply a
gang of robbers, murderers and plunderers who wished
to substitute the political means of coercion for the productive
means of economics. There is no “society” public or
otherwise, it’s as meaningless a term as “common good”
or “public interest” or “general welfare” or “central intelligence.” Et cetera.
What Locke wrote was that when you transformed the land with your labor it became yours. You certainly need a rifle to defend it but he never wrote that merely looking at a stretch of land made it yours. Later the Marxists perverted Locke to form the labor theory of value which the 19th century Austrians were the first to debunk and I can give refs here which you won’t read but for the general readers here check out the Mises.org site and you can locate many worthwhile books.
If you do enrich a piece of land, whatever size, it should be yours to keep and to dispose of. “Society” has no claim.
While conspiracy is a sneering, loaded term, it should be noted that the government uses it, the concept of conspiracy,
every day in criminal law. If they can accuse you, you can accuse them.
Unfortunately Georgian Cultists troll sites looking to take it over and readers should beware.
Michael, error is your specialty, isn’t it? You just don’t seem to be familiar with any of the authors you cite, save the one’s you find at the Ayn Rand Bookstore. Locke didn’t say what you attribute to him, and if he did it would be irrelevant. No parcel of land traces to original occupation; they all trace to right of conquest. I have the deed on my land because the Spanish dispossessed the Cheyenne, the Mexicans dispossessed the Spanish, and the Texans dispossessed the Mexicans. That’s the way it is all over. Locke did discuss original possession based on labor, which he said would lead to an equality of ownership. Then in paragraph 36 of the second treatise, he introduces the subject of money, drops the subject, and in para. 50 reaches the grand non-sequitur, that since we accept gold as money, we accept the unequal division of property.
You have used nothing but assertion and the argument from authority, and if you don’t realize this, then you have no idea what that argument is. But then, based on your claim that Rothbard “proved” an historical hypothetical, it is obvious that you have no idea what logic is and where and when “proofs” apply.
Marx did not invent the labor theory of value. That would be the oldest theory of value, especially with the Church Fathers, but the modern form is from Smith and Ricardo. And the notion was disputed long before the Austrians. But of course, they have a bit of difficulty in explaining where anything of value comes from, if not from human labor.
We know very well about the origins of society because there are still primitive societies all over. Guess what? Oppenheimer (as you quote him) is wrong.
And you do seem to like to call people cultists, a word which apparently means “to disagree with Michael.” Hmmm. There may be more cultists in the world than anyone suspected.
Thomas, I think that is the correct progression. Our notions of property recur periodically in history, but only in very advanced cultures were oppression becomes common and often in times of decadence, at the “end-game” as it were of society. The more common systems of property involve family use within communal ownership. That is the original division of property in the Torah, for example.
Locke said exactly what I attributed to him and if anyone is in doubt I suggest they read him directly, either in the Great Books edition or the reprints of his work.
Not ALL land was taken by conquest. In the North American continent as well as many other areas of Asia, Africa and Latin America there were HUGE areas that had no human habitation and even if some robber band had earlier conquered a given area it would have no legal or moral validity
once a newcomer mixed his land with his labor and intellect in
using the best means to civilize the land.
I didn’t say Marx INVENTED the labor theory of value and its earlier proponents such as Ricardo are discussed at great length in Rothbard’s two volume Classical Economics opus to which I referenced earlier. Marx is however universally regarded as the most consistent and prominent exponent of the labor theory of value.
Oppenheimer, whom I correctly quoted, is right. States did not spring from families but from robber gangs who preferred the political means of coercion to the economic means of peaceful production. Your worship of the family is as funny as it is ahistorical. There is no more dysfunctional group in the universe today than the family unless it’s the state.
The primitive groups you mention are the remnants of the pre-civilized robber gangs of yore as anyone can see who has visited with them in Australia, Africa or anyplace else.
Texas never dispossessed Mexico, they properly seceded from a brutal Mexican dictatorship. Here in California there were never more than a very few thousand Mexicans before California became a Republic. You have swallowed the old Marxist theory of the 19th century German Institutional historians hook, line and sinker.
Human THOUGHT is what made industrial civilization. Read
Atlas Shrugged and come into the modern world. Atlas is a hymn to the power of man’s mind, which is exactly what the labor theory of value primitives always ignore.
The Cheyenne never owned any land, they were tribal nomadic savages who had not the slightest concept of private property. They were merely communally squating on small sections of land which the Spanish took to civilize. The Mexicans later were settled Spanish with some Indian intermarriage and they properly rebelled against the Spanish as we did against the English whom we were once part of. Hate to shatter your romantic illusions about your land deed but facts are facts.
Everyone here asserts but I have also used argument WITH references so one has to take my word for anything.
You have only used assertions, ad hominems, poseur posturing and swishy sneers. 99% of the all parcels of land trace to original occupation by sedentary individuals. Even in Europe. Nomadic tribes of savages have no rights and recognize no such concept as rights. Locke was wrong on any absurd concept of equality of ownership, the whole notion of ANY kind of equality is absurd. We can go with Locke when he was right and oppose him when he was wrong. It’s called critical thinking, JM, you should try it sometime.
There are many cults and the Georgists are one of them.
John, you are a cockalorum and don’t waste any more of my valuable time.
Quoting from degenerate sources like the Unholy Bible, Talmud, Torah, ad nauseum. Have you no sense of decency at long last ?
To paraphrase Galt, if you want to pretend that you didn’t hear
what I said, should I pretend that I didn’t day it ?
Yes, because his time is SO valuable that he spends it memorizing other people’s positions instead of studying the truth or falsity of their reasons and learning arguments (or, indeed, to argue.)
Are we PROJECTING again, Thomas ?
I made the concise arguments that were required.
Refuting JM, you and George is not rocket science.
Then unlike your ilk, I gave copious references to
back up my assertions. You two have only given
assertions and ad hominems.
Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go back to Aristotle.
Rocket science or not, you haven’t done it. You have merely made assertions, like the Indians had no rights because they were nomads, or 99% of all land traces to original ownership, or “land is consumed in the process of production” (What do you do after each crop? Find new land?) Etc. It is all nonsense. But it is typical Austrian garbage, defiant ignorance elevated to an ideology. And yes, you did say Marx invented the labor theory of value. Your exact words, “the Marxists perverted Locke to form the labor theory of value..” Even you are so embarrassed by your nonsense that you have to disown it.
I’ve made assertions but unlike you I’ve given references to back my assertions. I’ve made as much argument as concisely as possible to demonstrate my points and
then to refer readers to sources for a fuller explanation.
Land gets exhausted after a certain period of time, you
have to find new uses for it. Sometimes it’s new crops,
sometimes it’s conversion to housing or other more productive forms of use. This is pretty elementary.
I’ve never disowned anything, I merely stated stated correctly
that while Locke’s original theory of labor had good aspects
it was not adequate to the Industrial Revolution where the
human mind plays the key role in directing physical labor.
And it has been the Marxists who have the main promoters
of this labor theory of value as it pertains to the Industrial Revolution. The only “embarrassment” I feel is a metaphysical one that a person so obtusely, willfully dumb as John C. Medaille exists on the same planet.
Read Reisman’s Capitalism, Mises’ Human Action, Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Paterson’s The God Of The Machine, Carl
Snyder’s Capitalism The Creator, DiLorenzo’s How Capitalism
Saved America, Rothbard’s Man, Economy And State With
Power & Market included in the Mises Institute Scholar’s
Edition, Mises’ Socialism, Hazlitt’s Economics In One Lesson, Hoppe’s Democracy:The God That Failed, The Vision
Of Ayn Rand by Branden, Woods’ Meltdown on the current Depression, Williamson’s The Myth Of The Noble Savage,
Rand’s Capitalism:The Unknown Ideal, Flynn’s The Roosevelt Myth, Keith Windshuttle’s debunking of Chomsky and pro-turd world history (forget title) , Who Is Ayn Rand by the Brandens, The Passion Of Ayn Rand’s Critics by Valliant,
Objectivism:The Philosophy Of Ayn Rand by Peikoff, FDR’s Folly by Jim Powell, The Ominous Parallels by Peikoff.
And The Complete Works Of Aristotle. Also The Decline of
American Liberalism (1955) by Ekirch.
Mises, Rothbard, Rand, Reisman, Hazlitt, Paterson, Snyder,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum, have forgotten more about economics and history and political theory and philosophy than George ever knew, than you ever knew.
Time to go bye-bye, little Mon.
DiLorenzo is a sham historian. His work on “the Real Lincoln” is not only false, it is easily demonstrated to be thus in every single instance, simply by means of a Google search. But I am not going to bother wasting the demonstration on you, Michael. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but at this point you are too busy making a fool of yourself to be considered mature enough to engage in reasoned conversation.
Giving a reference for an assertion does not make it any less of an assertion.
Land does not get exhausted; it gets poisoned. There is no need for this to happen, but even where it does, the land still endures, per omnia secula seculorum. It is not capital. Nor is time.
Giving us a one-sided reading list only proves what has been said: that all your information is from one point of view, which makes you willfully ignorant.
That still puts me way ahead of you, JM, because every statement that you have made here has been nothing but an assertion. I give references to back up my statements.
Land DOES get exhausted, ask any farmer. Only an enviro-primitive would regard all human technology as applied to land as “poison.”
Land is capital, it is part of the production process, it is not something sacred or special or god-given or belonging to the people. In real estate appraisal courses you learn about the
“highest and best use” of any land.
Everyone tends to give the list of books they think are the best explanation of the particular issue involved, which doesn’t mean that I haven’t read George, Mill, Spencer, Ricardo and Marx. It means that I found their views unconvincing. Now it’s your turn to read the other side.
By the way, we need to stop because you Georgists always
troll on sites to hijack the discussion. This started out productively until you and Thomas hijacked it for your cultist religion.
Thomas, DiLorenzo’s book is not only accurate in every respect but he has demolished every Lincoln apologist who has dared to debate him, most are frightened. Any idiot can post anything on Google but the intellectually honest historian
would check lewrockwell.com and go to the Thomas DiLorenzo archives and see his refutations of his critics. Not
only that but there have been many Lincoln revisionists inspired by DiLorenzo’s pathbreaking work.
Dishonest Abe was our worst President. He provoked the south into seceding, all Presidents before Lincoln (even including statists like Hamilton) recognized the rights of states to secede since the states created the union, not vice-versa. Lincoln cared less about slavery and was fanatical in his desire to deport all blacks, free or slave, to Liberia or the
Caribbean. Lincoln had opponents assassinated, thousands imprisoned without habeas corpus, used Sherman to commit literal genocide in the south, had POW camps even worse than the Confederates’ Andersonville, brought out worthless paper money on a large scale for the first time via worthless
greenbacks and abandoning gold, usurped the Maryland Legislature then in Baltimore to prevent from them joining the Confederacy and his legacy was an out of control Federal State, over 600,000 dead, the horrors of Reconstruction and later the Jim Crow laws in reaction. DiLorenzo shreds the Lincoln hagiographers. Gore Vidal’s novel Lincoln is more factually accurate than 99.99% of the hagiographical rubbish that passes for “history” on Lincoln.
Thomas, your remarks are what the shrinks call projection and it is pathetic that you keep writing me to tell me that your not going to write me ! You have yet to make a reasoned argument backed by references and you are reduced to sputtering ad hominems. Your faux “superiority” masks a
deep inferiority.
Readers here get all of DiLorenzo’s works starting with The Real Lincoln and look him up at LewRockwell.com.
It will be an intellectually rewarding experience combined with the reading list I recommended above.
Tom and John, get a life.
If there is one thing I will not stand for it is seeing two of my old professors, DiLorenzo’s leading critics, Dr. Ferrier and Mr. Quackenbush, impugned as “frightened.” You have never met them, you presumptuous ass.
For the benefit of others, DiLorenzo attempted to claim that the abolition of slavery was an attempt at political expediency on Lincoln’s part. After writing a book about Lincoln in which he manages to avoid quoting the man himself for the vast majority of the book, many of his assessments of Lincoln’s case are, in the first place, absolutely falsified:
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=27346
Furthermore, his interpretation of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates and Abraham Lincoln’s seemingly callous choice of words is absolutely unfounded in fact:
http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=13687
DiLorenzo, upon seeing this threat to his claim to credibility, attempted to rewrite history by claiming they were the ones who did so:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo17.html
and in the process makes an elementary mistake showing that he is in fact unfamiliar with the debates concerning which he wants everyone to think he is credible. When Ferrier claimed that Lincoln did not speak of his economic agenda at all in the LD debates, “not one word”, this was DiLorenzo’s response:
“Absolutely correct. There are many words, not just one. Such as during the July 17, 1858, debate in Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln said to Douglas, ‘You remember we once had a national bank . . . the Supreme Court decided that the bank was unconstitutional. The whole Democratic party revolted against that decision. General Jackson himself asserted that he, as president, would not be bound to hold a national bank to be constitutional, even though the court had decided to do so. He fell in precisely with the view of Mr. Jefferson, and acted upon it under official oath, in vetoing a charter for a national bank.’
Lincoln here was voicing his career-long animosity toward the Democratic Party’s opposition to central banking. Ferrier’s rather hysterical claim that there was “not a word” about any economic agenda in the Lincoln-Douglas debates is simply untrue.”
This is also the only source he cites in multiple articles to make his case; vide,
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=26610
In the first place, as Quackenbush noted, DiLorenzo’s own source, Neely, contradicts his claim that “The Federalist/Whig program of protectionist tariffs, nationalized banking and government subsidies for corporations was foiled for 60 years by strict constructionist interpretations of the Constitution. Once he and the old Whigs were finally in power, Lincoln was not about to let the Constitution stand in his way.” Neely himself, on the same page, states that “Lincoln was satisfied that the U.S. Supreme Court had declared a national bank constitutional, as had a majority of the country’s famous founders.”
But even that is beside the point, because DiLorenzo clearly didn’t read the entire debate he was talking about. Immediately before, Lincoln is speaking of Douglas’ habit of picking and choosing to call “constitutional” decisions made by the Supreme Court based on how he felt about them; in this case, the Dred Scott decision, which as every high schooler knows is about a slave suing for freedom. He mentioned the bank because this was another decision Douglas chose to call unconstitutional because it did not suit him. Don’t believe me? Googled:
“Let us go a little further. You remember we once had a National Bank. Some one owed the bank a debt; he was sued, and sought to avoid payment on the ground that the bank was unconstitutional. The case went to the Supreme Court, and therein it was decided that the bank was constitutional. The whole Democratic party revolted against that decision. General Jackson himself asserted that he, as President, would not be bound to hold a National Bank to be constitutional, even though the court had decided it to be so. He fell in precisely with the view of Mr. Jefferson, and acted upon it under his official oath, in vetoing a charter for a National Bank. The declaration that Congress does not possess this constitutional power to charter a bank has gone into the Democratic platform, at their National Conventions, and was brought forward and reaffirmed in their last Convention at Cincinnati. They have contended for that declaration, in the very teeth of the Supreme Court, for more than a quarter of a century. In fact, they have reduced the decision to an absolute nullity. That decision, I repeat, is repudiated in the Cincinnati platform; and still, as if to show that effrontery can go no further, Judge Douglas vaunts in the very speeches in which he denounces me for opposing the Dred Scott decision that he stands on the Cincinnati platform.
Now, I wish to know what the Judge can charge upon me, with respect to decisions of the Supreme Court, which does not lie in all its length, breadth, and proportions at his own door. The plain truth is simply this: Judge Douglas is for Supreme Court decisions when he likes and against them when he does not like them. He is for the Dred Scott decision because it tends to nationalize slavery; because it is part of the original combination for that object. It so happens, singularly enough, that I never stood opposed to a decision of the Supreme Court till this, on the contrary, I have no recollection that he was ever particularly in favor of one till this. He never was in favor of any nor opposed to any, till the present one, which helps to nationalize slavery.”
Saying that this means he was talking about an economic agenda is like saying that because I use an example in an ethics class in which someone builds a bomb, to demonstrate an unethical action, I am therefore teaching bomb-making; or that discussing the legality or illegality of weed makes one a botanist. DiLorenzo’s book is not worth the paper it is printed on, and you, Michael Hardesty, are not worth the time it takes to read your posts to anyone on this board. Perhaps that’s why the Oakland News Blog banned you from posting.
If there is one thing I will not stand for it is seeing two of my old professors, DiLorenzo’s leading critics, Dr. Ferrier and Mr. Quackenbush, impugned as “frightened.” You have never met them.
For the benefit of others, DiLorenzo attempted to claim that the abolition of slavery was an attempt at political expediency on Lincoln’s part. After writing a book about Lincoln in which he manages to avoid quoting the man himself for the vast majority of the book, many of his assessments of Lincoln’s case are, in the first place, absolutely falsified:
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=27346
Furthermore, his interpretation of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates and Abraham Lincoln’s seemingly callous choice of words is absolutely unfounded in fact:
http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=13687
DiLorenzo, upon seeing this threat to his claim to credibility, attempted to rewrite history by claiming they were the ones who did so:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo17.html
and in the process makes an elementary mistake showing that he is in fact unfamiliar with the debates concerning which he wants everyone to think he is credible. When Ferrier claimed that Lincoln did not speak of his economic agenda at all in the LD debates, “not one word”, this was DiLorenzo’s response:
“Absolutely correct. There are many words, not just one. Such as during the July 17, 1858, debate in Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln said to Douglas, ‘You remember we once had a national bank . . . the Supreme Court decided that the bank was unconstitutional. The whole Democratic party revolted against that decision. General Jackson himself asserted that he, as president, would not be bound to hold a national bank to be constitutional, even though the court had decided to do so. He fell in precisely with the view of Mr. Jefferson, and acted upon it under official oath, in vetoing a charter for a national bank.’
Lincoln here was voicing his career-long animosity toward the Democratic Party’s opposition to central banking. Ferrier’s rather hysterical claim that there was “not a word” about any economic agenda in the Lincoln-Douglas debates is simply untrue.”
This is also the only source he cites in multiple articles to make his case; vide,
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=26610
In the first place, as Quackenbush noted, DiLorenzo’s own source, Neely, contradicts his claim that “The Federalist/Whig program of protectionist tariffs, nationalized banking and government subsidies for corporations was foiled for 60 years by strict constructionist interpretations of the Constitution. Once he and the old Whigs were finally in power, Lincoln was not about to let the Constitution stand in his way.” Neely himself, on the same page, states that “Lincoln was satisfied that the U.S. Supreme Court had declared a national bank constitutional, as had a majority of the country’s famous founders.”
But even that is beside the point, because DiLorenzo clearly didn’t read the entire debate he was talking about. Immediately before, Lincoln is speaking of Douglas’ habit of picking and choosing to call “constitutional” decisions made by the Supreme Court based on how he felt about them; in this case, the Dred Scott decision, which as every high schooler knows is about a slave suing for freedom. He mentioned the bank because this was another decision Douglas chose to call unconstitutional because it did not suit him. Don’t believe me? Googled:
“Let us go a little further. You remember we once had a National Bank. Some one owed the bank a debt; he was sued, and sought to avoid payment on the ground that the bank was unconstitutional. The case went to the Supreme Court, and therein it was decided that the bank was constitutional. The whole Democratic party revolted against that decision. General Jackson himself asserted that he, as President, would not be bound to hold a National Bank to be constitutional, even though the court had decided it to be so. He fell in precisely with the view of Mr. Jefferson, and acted upon it under his official oath, in vetoing a charter for a National Bank. The declaration that Congress does not possess this constitutional power to charter a bank has gone into the Democratic platform, at their National Conventions, and was brought forward and reaffirmed in their last Convention at Cincinnati. They have contended for that declaration, in the very teeth of the Supreme Court, for more than a quarter of a century. In fact, they have reduced the decision to an absolute nullity. That decision, I repeat, is repudiated in the Cincinnati platform; and still, as if to show that effrontery can go no further, Judge Douglas vaunts in the very speeches in which he denounces me for opposing the Dred Scott decision that he stands on the Cincinnati platform.
Now, I wish to know what the Judge can charge upon me, with respect to decisions of the Supreme Court, which does not lie in all its length, breadth, and proportions at his own door. The plain truth is simply this: Judge Douglas is for Supreme Court decisions when he likes and against them when he does not like them. He is for the Dred Scott decision because it tends to nationalize slavery; because it is part of the original combination for that object. It so happens, singularly enough, that I never stood opposed to a decision of the Supreme Court till this, on the contrary, I have no recollection that he was ever particularly in favor of one till this. He never was in favor of any nor opposed to any, till the present one, which helps to nationalize slavery.”
Saying that this means he was talking about an economic agenda is like saying that because I use an example in an ethics class in which someone builds a bomb, to demonstrate an unethical action, I am therefore teaching bomb-making; or that discussing the legality or illegality of weed makes one a botanist. DiLorenzo’s book is not worth the paper it is printed on, and you, Michael Hardesty, are not worth the time it takes to read your posts to anyone on this board. Perhaps that’s why the Oakland News Blog banned you from posting.
Reminds me of something David Friedman wrote: Neither Anarchy nor Minarchy is Necessarily Libertarian.
Thanks, TGGP, Friedman has said it well.
Tom, you exactly prove Tom D’s points about Lincoln.
He was a statist whig of the Henry Clay Party Line who
had no interest in abolishing slavery at all and he was the
first US President to refuse to recognize the right of secession of any state that so desired. Even Hamilton,
an arch centralizer, recognized the right of any state to secede since the individual states created the union, not
vice-versa.
Who cares about your professors ? Tom D has refuted many
a graduate’s professor, favorite or otherwise.
Tom D quotes Lincoln all through his book and in not one instance did he ever falsify a quote.
Obviously, central banking is a very bad idea and contrary to the Constitution, which is why Jackson properly abolished it.
Lincoln was a stone cold fanatic on the subject of Negro inferiority and he wanted Negroes out of the US, either to Liberia or the Caribbean. Lincoln told a group of free Negroes at the White House in the middle of the war that they would never be the equal of the white man and that was his most strongly held view. So even Dishonest Abe had his moments of lucidity.
Now yet again you are writing to say that you don’t read me !
Well, then why are you referring to me ?
By the way Oakland News was a strictly left liberal Demo Party rag run by a nut who kicked off most of the members of the Oakland City Council and anyone else who opposed her,
which was 99% of Oakland. She was PC but hated Negroes as much as Dishonest Abe. Right after she expelled me, she dropped dead in January 2004, proving there is a God.
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