Amazon.com: The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War: Books: Thomas Dilorenzo

Amazon.com: The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War: Books: Thomas Dilorenzo: "The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Paperback)"

This being Fedruary 12 - and the 199th anniversary of the birth of "Honest Abe" - the subject of America's worst president seemed an appropriate subject on which to return to publishing my ruminations on public affairs.

I am happy that Thomas DiLorenzo's excellent The Real Lincoln is available in a paperback edition. I bought and read the hardcover edition several years ago and recommend it highly.

The question of Lincoln and his legacy may seem to belong to the dim, dark past. But, like other seminal events of our history - the motives and character of those who colonized America, the struggle to establish constitutional self-government, etc. - a clear and correct understanding of the facts, rather than the government-approved myths taught in government schools, is essential to understanding that history and evaluating our stewardship of the legacy bequeathed to us by so many who suffered, even unto death, for our liberties.

The book is frankly critical of Lincoln and the fables told about him. The Lincoln we find in The Real Lincoln is a white supremacist of a sort with whom even Gov. Ross Barnett of Mississippi, or Gov. George Wallace of Alabama, or Gov. Lester Maddox of Georgia, might well have scrupled to share a stage. This Lincoln also had a view of the nature of constitutional government very much at odds with the traditions of this country.

Walter E. Williams, the celebrated columnist and professor of economics, begins his foreword for the book this way:

In 1831, long before the War between the States, South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun said, "Stripped of all its covering, the naked question is, whether ours is a federal or consolidated government; a constitutional or absolute one; a government resting solidly on the basis of the sovereignty of the States, or on the unrestrained will of a majority; a form of government, as in all other unlimited ones, in which injustice, violence, and force must ultimately prevail." The War between the States answered that question and produced the foundation for the kind of government we have today: consolidated and absolute, based on the unrestrained will of the majority, with force, threats, and intimidation being the order of the day.

DiLorenzo demonstrates how great a revolution in governmental principles Lincoln's unnecessary war was. I would say as great a revolutionary turn as that by which we broke free from British rule, but that time a regression toward tyranny.

It would be immensely fitting if, a year from now, we could celebrate the bicentennial of the birth of a truly great American statesman who also began life in a humble home in Kentucky and rose to the leadership of a great republic founded on the principles of the American Revolution. I refer, of course, to Jefferson Davis.

Bush administration pushes food prices higher

 
Corn looks surprisingly good considering the very dry conditions that prevailed here for most of the summer. This is field corn intended for feeding the dairy herd on the farm where I live when I am in Pennsylvania. Corn is getting expensive and likely will go much higher which will force up prices of meat, poultry and dairy products. Another government program at work.

The Bush Administration has decided to score some brownie points with the environmental wackos by lining the pockets of a handful of corporations which stand to make a pile of money out of the ethanol from corn racket. This policy has been around for a while and has generally been dismissed as pandering to rural voters in the Plains and Midwest states. But the real beneficiaries have been the corporations that broker and process corn. There are also promoters prowling the countryside raising money from small investors with the promise of great riches to be had from owning a piece of one of the many ethanol manufacturing plants being planned and built in rural areas from Pennsylvania to the Dakotas.

Ethanol supporters tout the government's support for the industry which includes heavy off-budget subsidies by the federal government and some of the states. But, as one who neither grows corn nor owns any shares in ethanol or grain companies, how does it look from here?

Higher food prices form just the tip of the iceberg, and the easiest symptom of coming problems to discern at this time. Ethanol is highly inefficient in the engineering sense - comparing the energy required to produce it to the energy it makes available for transport fuels. Ethanol subsides also starve the Federal Highway Trust Fund of funds needed for construction of interstate highways. States which have followed the federal lead with reductions of per gallon fuel excise taxes on ethanol fuels are starving their own highway agencies of desperately needed funds for highway maintenance. Rising demand for corn to produce ethanol will also encourage the cultivation of corn on marginal lands best left idle or in crops less prone to encourage soil erosion.

The Austrian School of economics (and that included yours truly) takes a very dim view of subsidies to favored industries because they divert investment from other, objectively more profitable, alternatives and often require very painful corrections later. In the present case, we see a headlong rush to build new ethanol facilities which are almost certain to fail. For example, one investment newsletter I read recently reported that one northern Plains state already has enough ethanol plants - in being, under construction or in the fundraising and planning stages - whose operation will require more corn every year than the state has ever produced. Similar bottlenecks will develop in other states if the ethanol hysteria continues.

Go in peace, my former countrymen

ABC News: Love it or Leave it -- Record Number of Americans Flee to Canada:

"In 2006, 10,942 Americans went to Canada, compared with 9,262 in 2005 and 5,828 in 2000, according to a survey by the Association for Canadian Studies.
"Of course, those numbers are still outweighed by the number of Canadians going the other way. Yet, that imbalance is shrinking. Last year, 23,913 Canadians moved to the United States, a significant decrease from 29,930 in 2005."

If, as the article says, the reason for so many Americans heading to the Frozen North is politics, then let them go and good riddance. They can't make Canada much worse and they might help the real Americans keep this country from becoming another Canada.

Americans heading to Canada for political reasons has much deeper roots than the article's mention of the tens of thousands of vacationers who preferred the tundra to the rice paddies of Southeast Asia. All the way back to the American Revolution, people unhappy with the political trends in this counrty have made Canada their preferred destination - it's not far away and they speak English - most of them, anyway, albeit with a funny accent.

ABC uses the word "flee" in the headline even though one of the two persons quoted admitted to keeping an American Flag on his wall in Canada and having no intention to renounce his citizenshp here to become a Canadian. The Tories who went to Canada in the 1770s and 1780s were fleeing. One might even say that of the draft resisters of the 1960s and 1970s. But the word seems an odd choice in the present context.

A little perspective is in order here. ABC's idea of perspective is to say that the numbers of Americans moving to Canada are starting to catch up to the niumbers of Canadians following the sun southward. This is true, but less instructive than it might seem.

Canada is a huge territory with a small population - only a little more than one-tenth the population of the US. Using 2006 population estimates from the TIME Almanac and the figures given in the article for immigration each way in that year yields a very different picture.

So easy a caveman could do it. But not, it seems, easy enough for an ABC reporter. The bottom line: a Canadian is about 20 times more likely to move to the US as an American is to move to Canada. QED

The artist still known as Elton John explains what's wrong with Al Gore's invention

The Sun Online - News: Why we must close the net:

"I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span."

Sir Elton is, of course, entitled to exercise his right of free speech even when he chooses to say things that ate stupid, silly, or downright wrong as his remarks are this time. For some reason this is a common failing of artistic types, especially those on the left.

I won't bother giving this latest rant by an aging pop star a detailed analysis. It will suffice for me to endorse the following comment, addressed to Sir Elton by his birth name, posted by a reader on The Sun website:

Reggie Dwight, stick to music! One minute he wants to ban religion, the next the net. Funny he never wants to ban knighthoods for pop stars, gawdy clothes, bad hairdos or tax loopholes for the rich Posted_by: Proudanglosaxon

Population control has a new, high-profile cheerleader

We need fewer people to halt global warming - Telegraph :

"'My position on population is that I am disturbed that no one will talk about it,' [Chris] Rapley [head of the UK's Science Museum in London] says."

Maybe they aren't talking about over-population in Antarctica (Ripley's last job was running the British Antarctic Survey), but it is discussed elsewhere. I have even heard a high school girl bring up the subject in a casual conversation.

China's population controls have been widely publicized - and often criticized. When I was a young man, there was considerable attention given in the public prints to India's population control efforts. And, of course, there are many voices speaking of population control in Africa - from UN-funded family planning programs to hysterical claims that AIDS in Africa is a plot by white people to keep Africa backward.

Ripley's real problem is that effective measures to accomplish his goal are viewed with repugnance by so many people.

Meanwhile, birth rates have fallen below replacement levels in most of Europe. Even Mexico's birth rate has been falling rapidly. And the latest responsible demographic studies predict that world population will peak within this century and then slowly decline.

Ckicken Littles like Ripley and his pal Al Gore need a constant barrage of fear-mongering to drum up support for their coercive utopian visions.

The real threat

China Military Marks 80th Anniversary:

"Much has yet to change, however. People's Liberation Army leaders took the opportunity of the anniversary to recommit to their role as the ruling Communist Party's house army, rejecting any notion of shifting loyalty to the government."

The complexity of China is neatly captured here. The government of the Peoples Republic of China may claim to be, in some senses, the successor to the governments that came before it - certainly so as the rightful government of every place that ever was under the control of some government of China. Yet the Peoples Liberation Army still sees itself as the servant of the Chinese Communist Party rather than the government. Thus, the role of the army is not. in the usual sense, the defense of the homeland, but the instrument by which the power of the party is extended.

Take Taiwan, for example. It was not a part of China when the Communist Party was formed, nor was it a part of China when the PLA was formed. It was part of Japan. It passed to the control of the government of the Republic of China as a result of the ROC's role as an ally of the US and Britain in WW2. That government continues to exist although its capital is at Taipei rather than Nanking. For those who haven't been paying attention, the ROC is the one with a vibrant, if sometimes unruly, multi-party democracy while the PRC is the one with a one-party dictatorship.

Defending Taiwan is not on the same order as the ill-advised attempt to create a democratic regime in Iraq. Kowtowing to the dictators in Beijing is both undignified and self-defeating. War with the PRC is not necessary unless the PRC forces the issue. Keeping the lid on its own people is becoming an increasingly difficult challenge for the Chinese Communist Party. That lid might have already been blown sky high if our own government had not been so anxious to please that regime, even at the risk of other vital national interests.

On The Road With John Edwards - not the cold reader, the other one

Ben Smith's Blog - Politico.com:

"Can JRE pull off a JFK, or an RFK (asks Politico chief political writer Mike Allen, who is sharing guestblogging duties while Ben is on vacation)? John Edwards plans to announce Monday that he’ll take a break from fund-raising and campaigning in early-voting states next week for a three-day, eight-state, 12-city “Road to One America” tour aimed at calling attention to poverty in the deep South, the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia and the Rust Belt."

The Breck Girl - according to that other Politico blog, not yours truly here at OldPolitico - is set to take his roadshow on a tour highlighting poverty in America.

For some reason, Mike Allen wants to see this as harking back to the political tactics of the brothers Kennedy, JFK in 1960 and RFK in 1968. For example:

"The photogenic swing is reminiscent of John F. Kennedy’s repeated coal-country campaigning before the West Virginia primary of 1960. His overwhelming victory ended Catholicism as an issue in the campaign and brought national attention to Appalachian poverty. Twenty-eight years later, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis donned a hard hat and overalls for an hour-long tour of a West Virginia coal mine."

I remember JFK campaigning in West Virginia, but I don't recall it being billed as rich boy slumming. If it had been, it is doubtful that he would have crushed Sen. Hubert Horatio Humphrey (D-MN)in the primary.

There were, and are still, a lot of proud, independent folks clinging to those hillsides and working the mines and hard-scrabble farms; some of them - the Pauleys of Charleston - cousins of my maternal grandmother. Great-grandfather Pauley was an organizer for the United Mine Workers back when that put a price on your head and forced your immediate family into hiding. Those people in West Virginia appreciated all the attention. I remember eating often in a restaurant in Charles Town which had little brass plates on some of the plain wooden chairs, each inscribed with the name of a politician who had stopped there and sat in that chair - JFK, HHH, and several lesser lights.

Being put on display as a living museum exhibit of poverty would have been deeply offensive. The psychological value of a big win in West Virginia for JFK was that the state was one of the whitest and most protestant and the most southern of the few states (15 plus DC) on the primary schedule at that time.

As for Dukakis in his miner's hat that seems to me to have harked back to the Roaring Twenties when donning absurd headgear was de rigeur for politicos. Did you ever see a photo of Calvin Coolidge in an Indian headdress? Stunning! Unfortunately, Dukakis skipped the part of the Dress For Success manual that said small men should avoid large headwear. The most absurd image of his campaign was Dukakis sitting in the open hatch of a tank wearing a tanker's helmet and commo rig. After that he was toast.

Lyndon Johnson deserves the credit for making poverty tours fashionable. Commercial network television, of all institutions, set the tone with prime-time documentaries like Harvest of Shame (CBS Reports, 1960 - aired after the election) and Walk In My Shoes (ABC Close-Up, 1961); and Michael Harrington's book The Other America probably played a role, too.

LBJ followed up his January 1964 announcement of a War on Poverty with his nine-state tour of poverty in Appalachia in 1964. He may have been treading some of the same ground as JFK four years earlier, but this time there was intentional focus on poverty.

Immitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery. If so, Johnson should have been gratified by the alacrity with which other Democrats launched their own tours of poverty or hunger. These included Fritz Hollings in South Carolina and Bill Spong in Virginia.

Give the Devil his due, to quote another old chestnut, LBJ deserves the credit (or blame as many Southerners thought) for pointing to backward conditions in a region struggling to attract industry from the north and overseas to take up the slack from the decline of agriculture.

You read it here first

U.S. warns citizens over Naples garbage crisis | U.S. | Reuters :

"U.S. citizens traveling to of through the area may encounter mounds of garbage, open fires with potentially toxic fumes, and/or sporadic public demonstrations by local residents attempting to block access to dumps,' the embassy said in an advisory note."

Reuters updates the garbage crisis which I noted here on the 3rd of June.

Family rallies to support Dr. Haneef questioned in Australia about London and Glasgow bomb plot

Doctor's family explains plane ticket, SIM card - National - theage.com.au

"THE in-laws of Dr Mohammed Haneef, arrested at Brisbane airport on Monday night and held awaiting the arrival of British police, have an explanation for his sudden departure.

"His daughter was born 10 days ago — sick, with jaundice — and his wife, Firdous Arshiya, is suffering the after-effects of giving birth."

Unanswered questions remain despite the headline on this story.

The baby was born more than a week before he left. So, Dr. Haneef seems to have had ample opportunity to notify his employer of his need to return to India to be with his wife and their ill newborn baby. The family insist he was planning to return to Australia with his wife and baby as soon as arrangements could be made. Any reasonably intelligent and responsible person, much more so a doctor employed at a hospital, tells his employer when he is leaving and gives some idea of when he expects to return.

The family's explanation for the one-way ticket is equally unconvincing. Wouldn't it be cheaper for the doctor to purchase a round-trip ticket with open return and a one-way ticket for the wife and infant than buying three one-way tickets?

I won't be surprised if the family's explanation about the cell phone angle - that Dr. Haneef gave the SIM card to his uncle - also turns out to give more heat than light on the case.

The Glorious Fourth

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

How far out in left field do you have to be to interview Ahmadinejad?

Iran rejects Stone film request: Entertainment: International: News24:

"'We have already seen his documentaries - even though Stone is considered a member of the opposition group in the US, it is still part of the Great Satan,' he said."

Oliver Stone may have been trendy-lefty enough to make a documentary out of an interview with Cuba's president for life, but that's not good enough for Ahmadinejad. Maybe Ahmadinejad is just too polite to say he was disappointed by the failure of Commandante (the Castro flick) to generate much business.

For all the lefties out there (and I do mean out there) who are looking for common ground with the likes of Ahmadinejad, the news that Stone is just another tool of the Great Satan's propaganda machine ought to be a wake-up call. Alas, the lesson they will take from this will likely be that they must redouble their attacks on Bush, Christianity, capitalism, etc. to enhance their appeal to truly enlightened leaders like Ahmadinejad.

Call this one "the doctors plot"

Local suspects linked to UK plots - National - theage.com.au:

"Dr Mohammed Haneef, 27, was picked up by members of a joint federal and Queensland police taskforce as he was about to leave Australia to India via Malaysia.

"He had a one-way ticket but had not resigned from the hospital."

Another Indian-trained Muslim doctor, Dr. Mohammed Ali, who also arrived from Britain a year ago, is currently under questioning. Police authorities in Australia were at pains to say that Dr. Ali's case was not related to the British investigation of the attack on Glasgow airport and the two car bombs found in London.

This disavowal seems odd since the article also points out that the car belonging to the fleeing Dr. Haneef was found in the garage of Dr. Ali.

Let's see, six of seven suspects arrested in Britain are doctors and two more doctors are being questioned in Australia. Another blow the the sociological interpretation which holds that radicalism is bred by poverty and lack of opportunity. Of course, 9/11 also showed the falsity of such explanations in that several key players in that affair were engineers, a profession respected and in demand in most of the world.

Unlike the "doctors plot" in which Stalin - either from delusional paranoia or political calculation - accused Jewish doctors of trying to poison him, this one appears to be real.