Thomas Dilorenzo - Lincoln's Tariff War

The first of ten lectures from the 2006 Steven Berger Seminar: Thomas DiLorenzo on Liberty and American Civilization, recorded at the Mises Institute, 06-05-2006. [01:35:18]

http://www.mises.org/

LUDWIG VON MISES INSTITUTE - CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION 3.0

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• thomas
• dilorenzo
• lincoln
• tariff
• civil
• war
• secession
• slavery
• southern
• independence

[TheFlanker35]

@3:23,

The "seceding" South was trying to invade Kansas, Missouri, Arizona, East Tennessee, and West Virginia.

[FinallyTheNight]

Lincoln's public utterances concerning slaves are troubling. As a lawyer he represented slave-owners in support of the Fugitive Slave Act. Lincoln's steadfast dedication to keeping Illinois a "free" state meant that there would be no Negro slavery is Illinois because Negroes would not be allowed to settle in Illinois. Illinois would be a free state: a Negro-free state.

[selfrealizedexile]

@galoon

If you want to feel really depressed for wasting time in Macro (Micro wasn't a waste though imo), watch this if you haven't already seen it:

watch?v=MnekzRuu8wo

[selfrealizedexile]

@galoon

whether the American people have the foresight to end it before things get even worse or not.

[selfrealizedexile]

@galoon

But, as I was saying earlier, we live in a rational universe made by a designer who made sure it would auto-correct itself (good tends to triumph over evil eventually, etc.). The greedy criminals and Keynesians thought they could temporarily deceive themselves (and reality) with enough mental gymnastics and psuedo-science and statistical over-aggregation.

The fundamental mechanisms inside Nature never change, they wouldn't be fundamental if they did. So, the Fed's time will come

[selfrealizedexile]

@galoon

--their would be uneconomized usage of wood. This is what happened to the loan markets. With artificially low interest rates (this happens with student loans and college tuition, too, btw), you had uneconomized borrowing (over-leveraging--boy did we hear that word a lot on the news over the past two years) which consumed our real supply of loans quickly. This is what I meant by "capital consumption" earlier when I was discussing how the US has been gutting its productive capacity

[selfrealizedexile]

@galoon

that individuals become wealthier as their purchasing power increases (because there are more goods on the market with which to exchange, increased Quantity decreases Price as marginal utility decreases, etc.).

Yeah, the gov't will keep the price of wood low because it's a 'moral / social crime' that he can't have it simply because he wants it. Well, this will have greater rammifications on the supply of wood than the Katrina victims possibly not having it allocated to them.

[selfrealizedexile]

@galoon

a way to check it somewhat, although it's ofc not optimal--they can hold a foreign currency or exchange it for commodities, either one is not optimal in the long-term as they're merely havens and offer no growth (it's kind of like how people who hold gold think they're getting richer, but what's really happening is they just are not that much POORER for staying in dollars. Their purchasing power in the long-run really didn't change. It's only through increased production that

[selfrealizedexile]

@galoon

Technically, it wasn't a free banking era--just a freer banking era. There were still state laws and the gov't did, infact, control the money supply (it's even in the U.S. Constitution; I fully believe that the economy would have been even more prosperous throughout the 1800s if it were the Articles of Confederation instead, though I full concede that the natural growth of gov't and tyranny would have come still, perhaps through outright war).

Well, holders of dollars do have a

[selfrealizedexile]

@galoon

While that dynamic is common (the poor begging for socialized healthcare are the first to suffer once it causes further shortages as the gov't artificially keeps prices down and misallocates resources in its management), the biggest proponents of the Federal Reserve in terms of actual time investment and lobbying was the big banks and the Rockefellers and Morgans. I suppose one might say the same thing about the drug companies and health insurance companies lobbying for a mandate.