Like victims with Stockholm Syndrome it seems that citizens that are left love and reverence their most culpable genociders. After all, both per capita GDP increases and the unemployment rate decreases significantly when you reduce the denominator or numerator by 6, 20 or 40 million.

In California IOUs I mentioned the sacrosanct sociopaths, Abraham Lincoln and Alexander Hamilton. I received quite a few emails and comments from apologists for the Church of Lincoln along with some questions such as ‘What possible evidence can you offer?’, ‘Should Lincoln have allowed the South to leave with slavery intact?’ and ‘Maybe you can explain what you were trying to point out by placing them in this category?’ To help answer those questions I have brought on the show one of the preeminent Lincoln scholars.

INTERVIEW WITH THOMAS DILORENZO

Trace: In the episode 76 of the RunToGold.com podcast I brought on the Thomas DiLorenzo. He is an American economics professor at Loyola University in Maryland,  adheres to the Austrian School of Economics. He’s a senior faculty member at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Virginia Tech. He has authored quite a few books on this topic including The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln; his agenda and an unnecessary civil war where 500,000 Americans were genocided, then we also have Lincoln Unmasked: What You are Not Supposed to Know about Dishonest Abe, and is Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Arch-Enemy Betrayed the American Revolution, and What it Means to Americans Today.

So, as we delve into these topics, I think you’ll find it very interesting to remove some of the false assumptions that we find in our revisionist history. So, without further ado, on to the interview with Dr. Tom DiLorenzo.

Trace: Welcome to the show, Dr. DiLorenzo.

Tom: I’m pleased to be with you today!

Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo

Trace: Well, I have recently wrote an article about Lincoln and I mentioned Lincoln and Alexander Hamilton and some of the great injustices that they wrought on the American people, and I had quite a few questions about it, and I thought who better than the preeminent expert on Lincoln? You have written 2 books The Real Lincoln: A New Look at His Agenda and an Unnecessary War and also the book Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed to Know About to Know About Dishonest Abe. So when we’re talking about this great, revered American president, what are some of the things that are hidden about him? What are these things that we are not supposed to know about President Lincoln?

Tom: Well, one of the things you are not supposed to know is what he said in his first inaugural address, where he pledge his support for a constitutional amendment that would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering with slavery, and so in his first inaugural he was satisfied with enshrining slavery in the constitution explicitly. It had never been explicitly in the constitution. And in that same speech, he threatened a war over tax-collection. He said that it is my duty to collect the duties and imports – which is tariffs- but beyond that there would be no invasion of any state.

So he literally threatened a war, and carried out his threats, of course, by invading the Southern States over tax-collection, and that’s not taught in school. So, that’s one thing, he illegally suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus and imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern civilians, he shut down over 300 opposition newspapers, he deported an outspoken democratic party-member of Congress named Clement L. Vallandigham from Ohio and he confiscated firearms which violates the second amendment. And he basically started the war without the permission of Congress. So that’s why some historians call Lincoln a dictator, but they say he was a good dictator.

Trace: Oh yeah, because they are apologising, perhaps, for having a strong federal government and violating the 10th amendment, and a lot of those things. So when we are looking at Lincoln, and his… you know, you started with these gross violations of private property rights, really the Civil War was about collecting taxes, you say. It didn’t have anything to do with slavery.

Tom: Well, it did have something to do with slavery because Lincoln and the Republican party opposed only the extension of slavery into the new territories, it never opposed Southern slavery. In fact, as I just mentioned, Lincoln promised iron-clad constitutional protection of slavery but of course slavery was already protected by the Constitution, the Southern states did not have to secede to protect slavery, it was already constitutional, there were no challenges. The courts–the slavery — I wish there were, I wish we could have ended it peacefully, like all the other countries in the world did in time, but we did not.

And so, the basic cause of the war though was the Southern States thought that they were sovereign and they had the right to be in the union or not be in the union. Lincoln was the first American president ever to take the position that the federal government had the right to literally invade, pledge war on, his own country, to stop them from seceding. You have the New England federalists to secede in the early part of the 19th century they even have a convention in Hartford Connecticut in 1814 to vote up or down on succession and there was little discussion about whether it was illegal or not.

Just about everyone assumed that it certainly was legal because the States were sovereign. And so that was really what the war was about; are the States sovereign or is the government at Washington the master of us all? And of course when the North won the war, it proved that the government at Washington is our master, and no longer our servant.

Trace: Yeah, and I mean it was a very accepted doctrine that the States had a right to secede back then, especially Lysander Spooner was one of the people that argued quite a bit in favour of these states-rights, because how else can you have a government that governs with the consent of the governed, unless the people have a right to leave, or the states in this case.

Tom: That’s right. All you have to do to convince yourself of that is read article 7 of the U.S. Constitution which says that the constitution will be ratified by 5/13 states at the time. It didn’t say the U.S. government will ratify the states; it says the states ratify the constitution, granting delegated powers to the U.S. government, and those powers were supposed to be used to the benefit of the people of the states. The original system was that if the people were ever to be in charge for sovereign control of their own government, the way in which they would do it would be through political communities organized at the state and local level, that’s how we were supposed to be the masters rather than the servants of our own government, our own central government, and that was understood by everybody.

Like I said there was a group of federalists talked about secession, there was a secession movement in the middle Atlantic states in the 1850’s and even some of the famous abolitionists of the North proposed that New England secede from the South because they did not want to be apart of a country that still had slavery. Although I think we need to keep in mind that there were still slaves in New York City as late as 1853, so that’s not too far off of the Civil War era.

Trace: Yeah, so when we look at Lincoln it appears that ironically he extended slavery to all people in the Americas instead of actually abolishing it. In his erosion of these essential checks and balances in the political machinery that we have been talking about, you hit on it in the beginning, his gross violations in the beginning of the Great Writ, the Writ of Habeas Corpus, can you explain a little what the writ of Habeas Corpus is, and then delve in to what he did with his interference with the federal courts, and also with.

Tom: Well, see, it’s the one thing in the Constitution that guarantees our personal liberty and whenever the government accuses us of a crime we have the right to due process, we have the right to confront our accusers, we have a right to a speedy trial by a jury of our peers, and so forth, so that when Lincoln listed that he had the army literally break down the doors of houses of people and dragged them out to some dungeon somewhere in a gulag. And there were tens of thousands of people, including the mayor of Baltimore, the grandson of Francis Scott Key who wrote the Star-Spangled Banner, he was a newspaper editor who was opposing all of this, and a lot of prominent citizens.

These weren’t spies, these weren’t confederate spies, they were just Northern state citizens who were criticising the Lincoln administration. And they were imprisoned by the tens of thousands, and as far ex-parte Milligan goes, after the Civil War in 1866, Lincoln was dead, the Supreme Court slyly had a great ruling where they said that it was illegal for either Lincoln or the Congress to have suspended Habeas Corpus as long as the civil courts were operating the North, which they were. And they said that it is especially during wartime that we need to guard liberties because that is when they are most threatened, when it is some kind of an emergency.

And so they took the exact opposite tactic of what Lincoln himself said, and essentially suspending the constitution, is that it is most important during an emergency like war, to protect the constitution. And I think that’s one of the finest statements ever made by a supreme court in terms of constitutional liberty.

Trace: Yeah, so you had Lincoln, and I think…what was his argument? You said “you know, if we have to cut off the arm to save the body then it’s good”. So the Supreme Court battled with Lincoln over the great Writ of Habeas Corpus, and what is this about Lincoln issuing an arrest warrant for the chief justice?

Tom: Yes, in my book Lincoln Unmasked I wrote about the Chief Justice of the United States, Roger B. Taney, issued an opinion that Lincoln’s suspension of Habeas Corpus was illegal because the government can’t do it but the Congress has to do it, and Lincoln responded by issuing an arrest warrant for Chief Justice Taney, and I site several sources on that, including a former Supreme Court Justice among other people.

And so he did that. It’s really an act of tyranny, it’s an attack on the separation of power, and also documented in my book “Lincoln Unmasked” that Lincoln also trenched soldiers to arrest other federal judges, not just Taney but other judges who were about to writ the Habeas Corpus, that is, that would give people accused of a crime their day in court. And so this was not just an intimidation of Roger. B. Taney, it was intimidation of a lot of other federal judges as well that went on during the Lincoln administration.

Trace: Oh yeah, because he would actually station troops outside of their homes to prevent them from going to meet in session, right?

Tom: Yes, I got out of the National Archives a letter from a federal judge explaining to his fellow federal judges why he did not show up in court that day. He said he got home and his home was surrounded by armed soldiers who kept him essentially kidnapped in his own home, they kept him from going to court to issue the writ of Habeas Corpus, and I have to believe that this was a not a lone incidence of that sort. Lincoln essentially redefined treason to mean anyone who disagreed with him. So if you read article 3 section 3 of the U.S. Constitution which defines treason, it says waging war against the states or giving aid and comfort to their enemy, and so literally Lincoln’s invasion of the Southern states was the very definition of treason under the U.S. constitution. Anyone can ready article 3, section 3 and they will know that I am right about this.

Trace: And so, it’s kind of like terrorism. When I was in law school, I took a counter-terrorism class, and of course the law can’t define terrorism, and it seems to be terrorism is any opposition or dissent. And so Lincoln, who is engaged in perhaps the bloodiest episode of terrorism in the U.S., he did it definitely in violation of the constitution, and it’s great that you have done a lot of the research on these things, to expose a little bit about the revisionist’s history surrounding this historical figure because it appears that every country loves their dictators. Stalin is pickled, and you’ve got Mao, and he’s pickled. And last time I was in Beijing, you had lines of people to go and see Chairman Mao who, like Lincoln, definitely increased the per capita GDP by reducing the denominator, so we see the same thing with Lincoln, we have this giant Lincoln temple in Washington D.C.; to this person who really didn’t do nice things to the people of the United States.

Tom: One of the things that Americans don’t know is that all of the other countries in the world who ended slavery did it peacefully. And that includes the Northern states. There were no wars of emancipation in Pennsylvania, or Illinois or Massachusetts. Everyone in the world found a way pragmatically to get rid of slavery without mass murder and mass killing, there were over 650 thousand people died, including some 50 thousand Southern civilians during the Civil War and that, if you standardized for today’s population, that would be the equivalent 6 million Americans dying today in 4 years. If you put it that way, why didn’t we end slavery peacefully?

Well, the main reason was that the war wasn’t about ending slavery. I don’t think you’d find an historian who would tell you that Lincoln invaded to free the enslaved; he didn’t. He very clearly said, in fact, that his purpose was to save the union, not to do anything about the slaves. Although, of course I argued that he actually destroyed the voluntary union of the founding fathers and replaced it with a Soviet-style mandatory union.

Trace: Well, thank you very much. This has been an enlightening interview that helps clear away some of the lies found in the revisionist American history and I am sure we will have you again on the RunToGold.com Podcast. Perhaps to discuss Alexander Hamilton. Thank you.

So please do your civic and patriotic duty by leaving your comments about the reverenced Abraham Lincoln and sharing this with your friends and family!

Free market fundamentalism is a disparaging term that attempts to emasculate the credibility of anyone who is in favor of the free market, who believes that a voluntary society is morally justified and gives the best result. People have been trained to think of fundamentalists as dangerous, crazy people, so the strategy is to paste the descriptive term “fundamentalist” on someone who thinks that the government has exceeded its bounds, has screwed things up enough already, and that it’s time to try freedom again.

Freedom is ownership of your own body and your property, to use as you see fit. The only restriction is that you can’t infringe on the rights of anyone else. My freedom to swing my fists ends where your nose begins. The opposite pole is slavery. It is the absence of rights and lack of ownership of your body and property. Totalitarian socialism is slavery taken to its obvious and necessary conclusion. All citizens forfeit their rights to those of “society”, or the dictator, who poses as the all knowing mind of society. The opposite of free market fundamentalism is slave market fundamentalism. In all cases, slavery has been and is possible in the long run only if government is an active enabler or participant. Since government is the enforcer of slavery and the eliminator of voluntary markets, a synonym for slave market fundamentalism could be government fundamentalism.

The choice that we need to make is whether we want to move in the direction of freedom or in the direction of slavery.

Though America is still among the most free countries, we actually haven’t had truly free markets and free society for a very long time, only less oppression than others. We have the freedom to vote, but that has evolved into a license for legalized theft. Freedom has been replaced by bribing voters with goodies. Both major parties are big government fundamentalists. Both want to be the master. They differ only in their approach and target audiences.

We have the freedom to buy things, but that freedom is bound by the requirement to use the legal tender created by government, which is constantly being manipulated and systematically devalued. Our present economic situation is due to the boom and bust cycle inherent in our national monetary policies of interest rate distortion, loose credit and expansive money supply. At this time, nearly 98% of the value of the dollar has been inflated away by the Federal Reserve Bank since its founding in 1913.

We have the freedom to work, but that freedom is bound by a complex maze of regulation and distorted incentives which discriminate against the poorest and least skilled people in society. We are free to earn money, but that freedom is bound by confiscatory taxes of approximately 40% of national income to support unproductive government. It is a huge and growing parasite on the productive people in society.

We still have some level of freedom in our health care choices, but it is heavily bound by the chains of protectionism, regulation, and distortion by floods of federal dollars. Of any of the markets in America, health care is one of the least free, the most heavily bound by bureaucratic strangulation. It can be no surprise that it is also one of the most wildly distorted.

Education in America at all levels is a wreck and failing us and our children because of central planning by the government education monopoly. Any alternative is made very expensive and, in most cases, impractical. There is little freedom in education.

I am a market fundamentalist. I think freedom is right and is the definition of justice. Since free markets are merely freedom in all its forms, the only other alternative is to move toward slavery. Any person or business that doesn’t violate the body or the property of anyone else should not be subject to the whims of a politician. Any business that does violate the body or property of someone else should be punished for whatever violation they commit.

A distorted legal system that doesn’t protect rights, or corrupt officials that don’t punish wrong doers, are absolute necessities for slavery and oppression to flourish. A government of bureaucrats that imposes arbitrary, detailed rules on everyone is a form of slavery. Freedom and dignity include not being told what to do by a master, whether that master is a slave owner or a government bureaucrat. The move away from free markets is the move toward government fundamentalism.

However, none of these prepared me for the harsh economic realities of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M. T. Anderson. This is supposedly a YA novel—it won the National Book Award in that category in 2006—but to be honest, I wonder how many kids would willingly read this.

Why? Because Octavian is a slave, and this book hammers home what it means to be a thing rather than a person. This isn’t totally an economic matter; it is also a scientific matter, as Octavian is being raised as part of a scientific experiment to see just how smart Africans are (through how they respond to Western education).

Most of the book’s told from Octavian’s perspective, and it is, to be frank, both heartbreaking and hard to read. Octavian’s tutored into an elevated style from a young age and to reason and logic. If he cannot rationally justify a claim, it is given no weight. At one point, for example, Octavian discovers he has poisoned a dog he loved; he poisoned it accidentally from his perspective but as part of a scientific experiment on the part of his masters. He is then reasoned through his tears rather than being consoled.

The men running these experiments on Octavian measure every part of him, down to weighing his feces. Octavian’s life is completely rationalized. If he weren’t a thing—a slave—he would be the perfect economic man. That this scientific endeavor rests upon an economic base is brought home when the Earl of Cheldthorpe, patron of the entire experiment, dies. The new earl doesn’t have the same interest in abstract science, and the entire college is redirected to practical studies. Each science must justify its existence economically just as Octavian must do so rationally. As for Octavian, his study is redirected to serve the interests of those new backers now funding the investigation. This means he is turned from showpiece to house servant, that they try to hire him out (he’s a musician) to nearby parties, and that his education is reworked. It also means that the one possible justification (even in the period) of his treatment disappears. He’s no longer being raised for pure science. He’s being raised in a biased fashion, to fail in order to justify the economic interests of the slaveholding class.

There’s a lot more to The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing—the sub-economy of slaves in which personal energy is secreted away, the use of sexual desire as an economic counter—but Octavian’s position’s at the core of it. If you want to glimpse the dark side of economic forces (and get a sense of how much kids’ books have changed), you might dip in to The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing.

Editor’s note: Think slavery is no longer a part of today’s world? Read Mary Nichols’ report on human trafficking and how ineffective governments’ efforts are to stop it.

The real extent of human trafficking is unknown due its clandestine nature and a lack of adequate data collection. The U.S. government has calculated that, around the world, between 2 and 4 million people are trafficked annually, but many human rights and migration specialists believe that this vastly underestimates the true scale of the problem.

Sex trafficking has become the most common form of trafficking in recent years, with young women and children accounting for the majority of victims. But men are trafficked, too, often to be sold into forced labor. Traffickers are often of the same nationality as their victims and commonly consist of organized crime gangs. Their victims may be directly abducted or deceived by promises of well-paid jobs, legal entry into western countries, educational opportunities or marriage. Once in the destination country, they are frequently subjected to extreme mental and physical brutality by their employers and prevented from escaping. If detected by the authorities, they are often themselves treated as criminals for entering or working in the country illegally.

The main source regions for the trade in people are those with less developed economies and high levels of poverty: South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa and the countries of the former Soviet Union. In contrast, the destination countries for trafficked people are mostly in Western Europe, North America, the Middle East and other parts of Asia. Trafficking also occurs within country borders or to neighboring countries, a form which reportedly often involves young children.

International Shortcomings

The United Nations is now leading the fight against human trafficking; its Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children has been ratified by 119 nations to date. However, some 70 countries have not yet signed up while others are implementing the protocol ineffectively. Although overall numbers of prosecutions of offenders have increased in recent years, most escape with relatively minor penalties for their crimes, which fail to provide an effective deterrent to other traffickers. Moreover, there is little evidence that U.S. economic sanctions against countries that fail to cooperate in fighting trafficking, such as Burma, Cuba, Iran and North Korea, have much effect.

Since the economic rewards of trafficking outweigh the perceived risks of prosecution or the severity of the punishment, this inhumane trade is likely to increase. Moreover, in conditions of extreme poverty, potential victims will easily succumb to the promises of a better life or may simply make a calculated decision to try to better their lives by taking a chance on the unknown in a new country.

The lack of reliable data and information on trafficking presents one of the major barriers to the development of effective ways to tackle it. Even among those states that have signed the UN protocol, data collection and knowledge exchange on human trafficking is at best ad hoc. In the developed world, insufficient resources have been made available to improve the knowledge base, and data protection and other regulatory barriers have hindered information exchange between countries. In many of the poorer countries from which trafficked victims originate, resources are simply not available for statistics and research.

See Also

Laczko, F. & Gramegna, M.A. (2003) Developing Better Indicators of Human Trafficking.

International Organization for Migration, Geneva.

Seelke, C.R. & Siskin, A. (2008). Trafficking in Persons: U.S. Policy and Issues for Congress. Congressional Research Service.

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2007). The Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking.

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2008). United Nations General Assembly urges stronger action against human trafficking.

U.S. Department of Justice (2007). Nature and Extent of Human Trafficking.

U.S. State Department (2008). Trafficking in Persons Report.