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Monday, February 20, 2017

Guaranteed To Infuriate the Establishment

If there are any sacred cows in America, the one at the head of the herd has got to be Abraham Lincoln. Our culture gleefully vilifies almost everyone. Psycho-biographies, in which the darkest interior rooms of the subject are exposed to light, are the rage these days. But somehow Lincoln for the most part has managed to escape all this. He’s still the great American hero, venerated by layperson and scholar alike, sometimes to the point of embarrassing hagiography. (I once knew a history professor, for example, who insisted that students refer to Lincoln, both in class discussions and in term papers, as “MR. Lincoln.” His class could just as well have been offered by the theology department.)

Thomas DiLorenzo refuses to genuflect before Lincoln’s altar. In *The Real Lincoln*, a book that’s guaranteed to infuriate a wide audience, ranging from Civil War buffs to Lincoln scholars to African-Americans to political liberals to history traditionalists, DiLorenzo claims that Lincoln’s real historical legacy is the strong centralized state that characterizes the American political system today. From first to last, claims DiLorenzo, Lincoln’s political vision was the creation of a Whiggish empire of protectionist tariffs, government subsidized railroads, and nationalization of the money supply. In the first year and a half of his administration, he pushed through much of this agenda. The average tariff rate tripled, railroads began raking in government money (a “war necessity”), and the National Currency Acts monopolized the money supply.

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

And without Russia's help during WWII, we'd all be speaking German today.

Anonymous said...

Without our help and the pressure we help put on the Western Front and the Pacific, a lot more people could be speaking German and Japanese.

Anonymous said...

Lincoln's war killed more Americans than all of our other wars combined. No one likes to talk about that. Kennedy took us to the brink of a nuclear holocaust. But kill a president while in office, and they become glorified heroes, monuments, and all. Not only that, the government will re-write history to cover up their crimes and all they were unpopular for. Happy Presidents' Day.