I wanted to take a second and recommend an excellent book by Thomas Dilorenzo:

How Capitalism saved America: The untold history of our country, from the Pilgrims to the present.

It’s an awesome read and really delves into not just the history of capitalism but also the anti-capitalists and their flawed theories as well the idiocy of the anti-trusts, socialism and massive govco intervention. 

It really should be required reading these days with what the Democrats are trying to do to the United States.  He offers great, detailed examples of the wonders of Capitalism  and how time after time it gave us better results than anything the Government could ever dream about much less achieve. 

I’m looking forward to reading his book on Lincoln that really puts his Presidency into perspective.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
• 

That’s the apparent thinking of Florida politicians.  The evening television news yesterday in South Florida featured a piece on cops pulling people over because their window tinting was too dark.  “We can’t tell if they’re wearing their seatbelts,” said one coppper, as he fidgeted with some kind of tint-o-meter that supposedly measured the degree of darkness in window tinting.

As of July 1, Florida cops are permitted to impose about a $100 fine for each person in a vehicle who is not wearing a seat belt.  So tinted windows, which are pervasive in Florida, are seen as a major obstruction to tax collection.  Just in case the Booboisee might object, the news show put on the screen an A-K47 that was allegedly taken from a car with — you guessed it — tinted windows.

It just stands to reason, then, that the Florida legislature should outlaw curtains and all other forms of home window coverings.  Who knows what heinous crimes might be committed behind those curtains!  Why, there could be a poker game going on.  Or a 20-year-old Iraq war veteran could be having a beer with his dad.  A member of Congress from Massachusetts might be running a prostitution ring in his basement.  Or a judge might be smoking a joint after a long day in court.  If we are ever to achieve a vice-free society, curtains and window blinds must be outlawed, and thousands of Peeping Tom Police must be hired at once.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/should-curtains-and-window-blinds-be-outlawed/

I never got to recap a few special speakers that we hosted at Drexel University this term, so since today marks the first day of the summer term, I would like to write about their visits.

On May 12th, Student Liberty Front hosted Radley Balko at Drexel University. Balko is a former policy analyst with the Cato Institute, and now a senior editor for Reason magazine. He also is a biweekly columnist with FoxNews.com. He spoke on the drug war and police militarization in America.

On May 28th, Student Liberty Front hosted  Rep. Sam Rohrer and Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo in “The Destruction of American Federalism: A Silent Threat to American Liberty.”

Both of these events got attendees from not only Drexel, but the Philadelphia area, especially through the use of networking on www.meetup.com.

For the summer term, we are going to be planning more “fun events,” mainly movies and even South Park episodes (the creators are Libertarians) and decipher different political meanings from the films.

I am also looking into creating a SSDP and a Concealed Campus at Drexel, along with aiding Deanna Quinones with YAL.

In the Fall term, we’re hoping to get Ron Paul, so stay in touch for information!

A graphical view from Richard Mckenzie It’s a good review for MBA students.

From Wikipedia —

Economies of scale, in microeconomics, are the cost advantages that a business obtains due to expansion. Diseconomies of scale are the opposite. Economies of scale may be utilized by any size firm expanding its scale of operation. The common ones are purchasing (bulk buying of materials through long-term contracts), managerial (increasing the specialization of managers), financial (obtaining lower-interest charges when borrowing from banks and having access to a greater range of financial instruments), and marketing (spreading the cost of advertising over a greater range of output in media markets). Each of these factors reduces the long run average costs (LRAC) of production by shifting the short-run average total cost (SRATC) curve down and to the right.

Overview

This should not be confused with increasing returns to scale which is represented by the SRATC where simply increasing output within current capacity reduces the short run cost per unit.

This is, of course, an extremely simplistic example and, in real life, there are countering forces of diseconomies of scale. As these forces balance, an optimum production volume can be found (referred to as constant returns to scale).

This principle can be equally applied to an organization resulting in firms within a particular industry tending to be similar sizes. Economists have studied this effect as the theory of the firm.

A natural monopoly is often defined as a firm which enjoys economies of scale for all reasonable firm sizes; because it is always more efficient for one firm to expand than for new firms to be established, the natural monopoly has no competition. Because it has no competition, it is likely the monopoly has significant market power. Hence, some industries that have been claimed to be characterized by natural monopoly have been regulated or publicly-owned.

In the short run at least one factor of production is fixed. Therefore the SRAC curve will fall and then rise as diminishing returns sets in. In the long run however all factors of production vary and therefore the LRAC curve will fall and then rise according to economies and diseconomies of scale.

There are two typical ways to achieve economies of scale:

1. High fixed cost and constant marginal cost
2. Low or no fixed cost and declining marginal cost

Economies of scale refers to the decreased per unit cost as output increases. More clearly, the initial investment of capital is diffused (spread) over an increasing number of units of output, and therefore, the marginal cost of producing a good or service is less than the average total cost per unit (note that this is only in an industry that is experiencing economies of scale)

An example will clarify. AFC is average fixed cost

If a company is currently in a situation with economies of scale, for instance, electricity, then as their initial investment of $1000 is spread over 100 customers, their AFC is .

If that same utility now has 200 customers, their AFC becomes … their fixed cost is now spread over 200 units of output. In economies of scale this results in a lower average total cost.

The advantage is that “buying bulk is cheaper on a per-unit basis.” Hence, there is economy (in the sense of “efficiency”) to be gained on a larger scale.

Economies of scale tend to occur in industries with high capital costs in which those costs can be distributed across a large number of units of production (both in absolute terms, and, especially, relative to the size of the market). A common example is a factory. An investment in machinery is made, and one worker, or unit of production, begins to work on the machine and produces a certain number of goods. If another worker is added to the machine he or she is able to produce an additional amount of goods without adding significantly to the factory’s cost of operation. The amount of goods produced grows significantly faster than the plant’s cost of operation. Hence, the cost of producing an additional good is less than the good before it, and an economy of scale emerges. Economies of scale are also derived partially from learning by doing.

The exploitation of economies of scale helps explain why companies grow large in some industries. It is also a justification for free trade policies, since some economies of scale may require a larger market than is possible within a particular country — for example, it would not be efficient for Liechtenstein to have its own car maker, if they would only sell to their local market. A lone car maker may be profitable, however, if they export cars to global markets in addition to selling to the local market. Economies of scale also play a role in a “natural monopoly.”

Typically, because there are fixed costs of production, economies of scale are initially increasing, and as volume of production increases, eventually diminishing, which produces the standard U-shaped cost curve of economic theory. In some economic theory (e.g., “perfect competition“) there is an assumption of constant returns to scale.

In Porter’s analysis, Elements of Industry Structure, ‘Economies of Scale’ is an element of ‘Entry Barriers’ concept. This is one of the fact which should be taken under care while entering an industry. In Porter’s view, cost leadership strategy is realized through ‘economies of scale’ production thinking.

References

Joaquim Silvestre (1987). “economies and diseconomies of scale,” The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, v. 2, pp. 80–84.

External links

Economies of Scale Definition by The Linux Information Project (LINFO)

The Myth of the Natural Monopoly by Thomas DiLorenzo

Kevin R. C. Gutzman | TakiMag | January 12, 2009

Under discussion:

Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of Our Greatest President, Thomas L. Krannawitter, Roman & Littlefield (2008), 376 pages

Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Arch Enemy Betrayed the American Revolution—and What It Means for Americans Today, Thomas DiLorenzo, Crown Forum (2008), 256 pages.

Christianity made an epochal change by elevating ordinary people to spiritual equality with the social, political, and economic elite. In the old religion of Greece and Rome, the gods were beautiful, immortal supermen. Roman emperors, the closest thing to gods on earth, often received deification at death; their temporal greatness made them indistinguishable from the divine, and stationed well above the hoi polloi.

Not only did Christianity say that mundane man could ascend to the emperor’s level, but Jesus counseled that He was in “the least of these.” Among the Orthodox, St. Symeon the New Theologian went so far as to advise Christians to steer clear of political authority. The exercise of power over other men required politicians to act in un-Christian ways, whether by making war, by executing malefactors, or otherwise. Rather than bear such a burden, he said, better to avoid it.

The transition to Christianity also radically affected the ancient tradition of biography. Works such as those of Arrian and Plutarch, Suetonius and Tacitus, which had sought instruction and/or entertainment in the lives of the great, yielded place to a Christian tradition of hagiography. From St. Athanasius’ Life of St. Anthony on, the struggle to achieve Christ-centeredness, the saints’ working out of their own salvation, took pride of place. Monks became popular heroes.

In the medieval period, yes, lives of great rulers did occasionally appear, but most were marked by extensive attention to the ruler’s Christianity. A shift back toward the old emphasis came in the Renaissance, which marked a rebirth of heroic ideals of ancient paganism. Perhaps the first modern biographer was the 18th-century francophone man of letters Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose own autobiography featured neither inspiring greatness nor estimable asceticism. Rousseau really was in it for himself.

This degradation of the biographical form reflected a change in the way that a post-Christian era aborning, the self-styled Enlightenment, understood man’s relationship to history and the cosmos. The ordinary individual mattered as much as anything, Rousseau believed, and no individual more than he.

Ultimately, the idea that great men were no more significant than small gave way to the idea that great men are not really great at all. One finds perhaps the most passionate statement of this idea in the final section of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. There, the great man by birth, Tolstoy, descendant of people just below the Romanovs in Russian society and owner of hundreds of serfs, elaborates upon his contention that the individual great man matters not at all. France in Napoleon I’s day had to attack Russia, he asserts, and the emperor was merely swept along by history.

Today, biography runs the gamut from lives of great men to semi-fictional autobiographies of purported ex-addicts. Lives of celebrities attract extensive attention, and the best-seller lists are full of titles about long-dead politicians and statesmen.

One powerful current of American biographical writing is the extended eulogy to a particular political figure. Critics of the surge of popularity enjoyed by such works over the past decade have dubbed it “Founders Chic.” Where some authors once upon a time promised “warts and all” accounts of notorious fellows, books with titles like Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America now earn their authors substantial royalties from the worshipful by demonstrating that warts did not exist in days gone by; in fact, long-dead statesmen had only the most politically correct current opinions!

Leading scholars of the American Revolution who came of intellectual age during the Vietnam War and Watergate, generally disdain this approach, and in fact the efflorescence of American Revolution studies over the past 40 years is of a quality unseen in the study of any other historical topic, anywhere, ever. Yet, potboilers by authors like David McCullough draw far more popular attention.

Close behind leading figures of the Revolution in book-buyers’ esteem are other American presidents. The chief attractions are Franklin Roosevelt, Andrew Jackson, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and, in first place by a large margin, Abraham Lincoln. Accounts of presidential “greatness” seem always to be in season, demand for them insatiable. Thus, the January 4 New York Times Hardback Nonfiction Best-Seller List (extended) included a book about Jackson, four books about Barrack Obama, and one title about once and future presidential aspirant Mike Huckabee, while the Paperback list for the same day included a Lincoln book, three Obama books, and a Roosevelt tome.

One might infer that the availability of such a large number of works meant that at least there was a range of opinions on these people. But one would be wrong. The biographical approach popular with book-buyers starts at flattering and extends to vindication. With the exception of their ongoing interest in Richard Nixon, Americans want to read positive accounts of bygone presidents.

It seems not to matter that the people of whom they read flattering accounts often loathed each other, personally and politically, in their day. History “buffs” of 2009 admire Jefferson and Adams, Washington and Jackson, James Madison and Abraham Lincoln. When one said things that disparaged another (as, for example, when it comes to Jefferson’s appraisal of President Adams or of General Jackson, or Lincoln’s estimation of President Jefferson), no problem!

The ancient historian Plutarch arranged his magnum opus, Parallel Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, in pairs intended to present pro and con portraits of people displaying mirror-image characters. Plutarch hoped that his readers could learn something of how to behave in seeing the wages of eminent men’s (mis)behavior. American readers, however, seem to have adopted an attitude of “I just like to know what they did. They were so great!”

Perhaps nowhere is the tendency to lick one’s subject’s boots more in evidence than in relation to Abraham Lincoln. New Orleans may have decided that it was inappropriate for a public high school to be named for slave-master George Washington, John Adams deservedly earns criticism for the Sedition Act, and Franklin Roosevelt unthinkingly carried a cigarette in public, but Abraham Lincoln is not to be criticized in any way.

Thus, in relation to the Constitution, one adulatory account called Lincoln a good dictator. In explaining his frequent racist statements, spread over a long period of time, another historian—one recently given the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush—said that “This is how honest people lie.”

To dare to dispute Lincoln’s view of the Constitution may earn one the sobriquet “neo-Confederate.” A recent account of Lincoln’s most famous speech is entitled The Gettysburg Gospel. One could go on. Many people make mountains of money writing adoringly of Abraham Lincoln.

There have been a few critical accounts of Lincoln by hardy souls—certainly not untenured professors—in recent years. Charles Adams and, most notably, Thomas J. DiLorenzo have attracted attention with substantial criticisms. In general, DiLorenzo’s best-selling Lincoln books are mirror images of the run-of-the-mill; for example, where leading lights of Lincoln scholarship believe that Lincoln can do no wrong, DiLorenzo insists that American slavery would have ended peacefully soon after 1861 even in the absence of Lincoln’s efforts.

I know of no reason to believe that, and good reason to disbelieve it. American slaves reached their highest value ever in 1860. They had been appreciating for years. Their value helps to explain southern touchiness about the future of slavery in the Union.

But that does not mean that DiLorenzo’s criticisms are all ill-founded. And what DiLorenzo calls “the Lincoln cult,” centered in Claremont, California, among the students and other acolytes of Harry V. Jaffa, has fired back.

Their response takes the form of Thomas L. Krannawitter’s Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of Our Greatest President. The title is self-explanatory. Seemingly the sole shortcoming of Lincoln’s statesmanship, for Krannawitter, was his limited understanding of the economic effects of the American System.

Skeptics of the Lincoln myth are summarily dismissed. On pages 160-61, I learn that I am a “secessionist,” as if I were taking part in a rebellion of some kind. And in a fit of Jaffa-like name-calling, Krannawitter makes Thomas E. Woods Jr. a “historicist.” Woods may be a lot of things, but this long-time associate editor of Latin Mass magazine does not think that all truth is time-bound. (A better description of Woods might be “more Catholic than the pope”!)

The tack that Krannawitter intends to take is made evident by a careful perusal of his endnotes. While he says quite a lot about the “Founders” and the “Founding,” there is no mention of the most obvious scholarly source on the ratification debates in the several states. In other words, Krannawitter holds forth for 200-odd pages without having read the chief sources.

So why doesn’t Krannawitter pepper his book with references to the chief documentary source on ratification of the Constitution? Because he relies on Lincoln’s version of history instead. Lincoln’s account, alas, was basically cribbed from John Marshall’s partisan opinion in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), which said that the Constitution was made not by the states but by one American people, despite what the Constitution itself said in Article VII. Lincoln, of course, deduced from Marshall’s false account that secession was impossible, despite what a committee of which Marshall was a member had told the Virginia Ratification Convention in 1788.

The odd thing about books with “vindication” in their titles, of course, is that they are not scholarship. They seem rather more to resemble the products of political parties stumping for their candidates, or of religious bodies defending their dogmas. Were there not so great a gap in learning between Krannawitter and Origen, I might say Vindicating Lincoln is of the same genre as Contra Celsum, or perhaps St. John of Damascus’s treatise On the Divine Images.

Mencken called the Gettysburg speech “genuinely stupendous.” But then reminds us, “[L]et us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense.

Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination—that government of the people by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union solders in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.

All this raises the question why the Church of Lincoln defends its leader and his myth so zealously? The answer, of course, is that the state cult of Lincoln underlies much of what nowadays is commonly called “America’s purpose.”

We heard quite a lot at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall about what America’s purpose would thenceforth be. Alas, since the Lincolnian rededication of the USA in the “new birth of freedom,” Americans have gone in for the idea that their country has a “purpose.” Moreover, this new “purpose” has cost the average American dear. It might almost be said to be America’s special curse. Imagine someone debating Sweden’s purpose, say, or India’s. Since “His truth … march[ed] on,” in Mrs. Howe’s words, again and again Americans have been roused to momentous sacrifice and suffering in the name of their purpose.

In 1898, that purpose was to relieve the suffering subjects of imperial Spain. In 1916, it was to make the world safe for democracy. In the Cold War, it was somehow to stand as a “shining city on a hill,” a secular nirvana to which all could repair. George W. Bush says that he is going to eliminate evil from the world.

With confidence in their purpose, Americans know that it is moral for them to intervene anywhere. Who could object, indeed, to bringing the vote to Mesopotamia or to admitting girls to government schools in Afghanistan? Whatever the real reason behind it, the U.S. Government’s latest assertion abroad will almost invariably be covered in some way with a patina of “purpose.”

America’s special purpose can be appreciated best, Krannawitter and his ilk insist, through study of the career of Abraham Lincoln. Distasteful elements in his life—frequent use of the N-word, for example—mark Lincoln simply as the pragmatic idealist who had to play the racist to beguile the racists around him. He didn’t really want war. He was right that God was responsible for the war’s severity. Etc.

Apparently the Lincoln church had its own Vatican I, and kept the notes secret.

It is not only followers of the Great Men in American history who ascribe god-like powers to them, however. Some of their opponents do precisely the same thing. Consider, for example, the latest work of one of Krannawitter’s chief targets, Thomas DiLorenzo.

DiLorenzo did a service by exposing the slavish attitude of the Lincoln industry. Although some of his assertions, such as that concerning the likely fate of slavery in the absence of the Civil War, strike me as essentially groundless, it is a useful exercise to consider so lauded a figure from a critical perspective.

The latest target of DiLorenzo’s ire is Lincoln’s precursor, Alexander Hamilton. The first secretary of the treasury, Hamilton can be seen as the fountainhead of virtually all of the ideas that Lincoln ultimately brought to fruition: corporate welfare, use of the military against state self-determination, censorship of political opponents, protective tariffs, government funny money, etc. The path from Hamilton to Marshall to Lincoln is a straight line.

Which is not to say that Hamilton is responsible for all statism in America since 1786. Reading DiLorenzo’s Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution—and What it Means for Americans Today, one repeatedly gags at the bit as DiLorenzo tries to whip him around the track of Hamilton blame one more time. Yes, Hamilton’s idolators at the New-York Historical Society did entitle their 2004 exhibition “Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America,” but their hyper-exaggeration should not inspire similar overstatement from Hamilton’s detractors.

Can we really blame Hamilton for the Federal Reserve? Is it fair to refer to the Second Bank of the United States, which Congress chartered at President James Madison’s request a dozen years after Hamilton’s death, as “Hamilton’s bank”? In sum, is “credit” for the “National Greatness Conservatism” of Bill Kristol and David Brooks properly laid at Hamilton’s door?

We do not know whether Hamilton would have been a neo-Jacobin in 2009. Yes, he did say that the problem in American politics for the foreseeable future would be that the states were too powerful in relation to the Federal Government, but that was 200+ years ago. It is not historical to make of Hamilton an all-purpose anti-freedom symbol, just because he stood for a far stronger government than the Articles of Confederation and against constitutional limitations on federal power in his own day.

DiLorenzo’s evaluation of Hamilton is highly overheated. Just as his evaluation of Lincoln was. Likely this is because he does not trust his reader to weigh the mixed, but finally negative, records of the men about whom he writes. The result, however, is to weaken his own case against promoters of the American “purpose.” Extremism in defense of liberty may be no vice, but reasoned explication is far more persuasive. Mature American readers might hope for something a bit more balanced than a saint’s life or a standard-issue Nixon biography. Even if the market rewards authors such as Krannawitter and DiLorenzo.

William N. Grigg | Pro Libertate Blog | Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Dick Cheney wasn’t the first Vice President to shoot somebody: Aaron Burr is depicted here shooting and mortally wounding Alexander Hamilton during their 1804 duel in Weehawken, New Jersey, an “affair of honor”, that came a couple of decades too late to save America from a lot of economic misery.

Recalling the death of Alexander Hamilton at the hands of Aaron Burr, one is inevitably prompted to borrow the line from Shakespeare’s Scottish Play: “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.”

After examining the legacy of the first U.S. Treasury Secretary in Thomas DiLorenzo’s timely and indispensable new book Hamilton’s Curse, one might be forgiven for wishing the deadly round fired by Burr’s pistol during the 1804 duel at Weehawken had found its target two decades earlier, or that Hamilton — who displayed genuine valor as an artillery officer in the War for American Independence — had died heroically on the battlefield before laying the foundations of the corporatist system under which we now live.

A worshipful biography of Hamilton published several decades ago bore the title To Covet Honor, a phrase used by the author without irony.

The line from which that title was taken — “If it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul alive” — was uttered by Henry V on the eve of a battle in a war waged in the cruelest fashion on the thinnest of pretexts.

Understood in its context, rather than in the heroic light in which that author hoped to bathe his subject, that phrase actually reflects some elements of Hamilton’s personality and ambitions that led him to betray the American Revolution.

Hamilton, as is widely known, favored a highly centralized government, a near-dictatorial executive, and a mercantilist/corporatist economic system. As DiLorenzo points out (and as we’ll see anon), in the pursuit of his nationalist designs Hamilton had no compunctions about using what Exeter, King Henry’s royal emissary who delivered an ultimatum to the French, called “bloody constraint” against his countrymen who preferred freedom to Hamilton’s concept of “greatness.”

Indeed, Hamilton’s notion of “honor” obtained through bloodshed and coercion wasn’t that different from that of Prince Hal, the “vain, giddy, shallow, humorous youth” who sought to vindicate his kingly stature by waging the first war his advisors could contrive.

As depicted by The Bard, Henry — the “mirror of Christian kings,” a line Shakespeare almost certainly imbued with bitter irony — broke the siege of Harfleur, a town he called “guilty in defense” for resisting the English invaders — by threatening to authorize his soldiers to rape young girls, massacre frail old men, and skewer squalling infants on pikes, “Whiles the made mothers with their howls confus’d, Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry At Herod’s bloody-hunting slaughtermen….”

The same King Henry willing to unleash officially sanctioned infanticide later hanged a soldier — a former carousing buddy — for stealing a trinket without royal permission. The same king who was given to self-pitying soliloquies about the burdens of his office (“What infinite heart’s ease must kings neglect that private men enjoy…. What kind of god art thou, that suffer’st more Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers?”) ordered the summary execution of helpless prisoners, a war crime that earned not the respect but rather the contempt of the over-matched French.

Since I’m an individualist of the Jeffersonian tradition, I’ve long held Hamilton in qualified contempt, a sentiment tempered by my respect for Hamilton’s role in crafting Washington’s Farewell Address, and some elements of his arguments offered behind the pseudonym Pacificus during the debate over U.S. neutrality in the conflict between England and France. (Both Hamilton and Washington were right about neutrality, and wrong about the power of the president to issue a neutrality decree that had the force of law; Washington, of course, was humble enough to admit his mistake.)

DiLorenzo’s book documents that Hamilton, despite his legitimate heroism in the cause of Independence, may have had the most pernicious influence of any political figure in our nation’s history.

Nearly all of the salient traits of the modern Leviathan State headquartered in Washington — the imperial presidency, judicial activism, the Federal Reserve System’s institutionalized counterfeiting and fraud, the ever-metastasizing government debt, the ever-expanding ranks of tax-subsidized corporate welfare parasites, the reduction of the states to docile administrative units of a unitary regime — were inspired by, and are the fulfillment of, Hamilton’s designs.

Hamilton once complained of “an excessive concern for liberty in public men,” a swipe at Jefferson and other freedom zealots who placed individual rights and dignity above considerations of “national greatness.” Hamilton’s designs were unabashedly imperial. They required that the central government absorb the powers of all other political and social entities, and that the president enjoy unqualified discretion in using those powers to build and perpetuate a strong and expanding state.

To that end, notes DiLorenzo, Hamilton devised a scheme to wed the central government with the super-wealthy. A growing state is sustained by debt, and this meant expanding the ranks of government bondholders and tending to their needs. This meant ensuring a steady stream of revenue into the government’s coffers and into the accounts of bondholders.

Hamilton thus sought to “tie the wealthy of the country (who would be primary purchasers of government bonds) to the government, thereby creating a formidable political pressure group in favor of bigger government and higher taxation.”

Obviously, this was before the advent of the fiat money system under the Federal Reserve System, whose managers gratefully acknowledge Hamilton as their intellectual ancestor. In today’s version of the Hamiltonian corporatist system, DiLorenzo notes, politically connected business interests consistently agitate on behalf of both a larger direct tax burden and expanded government spending financed through monetary inflation.

Hamilton’s vision of a unitary state with unlimited powers was not the union of “free and independent states” for which the American Patriots had fought. Instead, the vision that caused Hamilton’s pulse to race and loins to stir was that of “a United States woven together by a system of tax collectors,” as James Madison sardonically observed.

Up the rebels! The Whiskey Rebels of western Pennsylvania, that is. At left: The Whiskey Rebel flag. Below right: Rebels introduce a tax collector to the latest fashions in tar-and-feather couture. Sic semper tyrannis!

It was in the service of that vision that Hamilton afflicted Americans with various excise taxes, and then abetted the invasion of western Pennsylvania in the first use of military power by the central government against Americans — the campaign to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion.

Farmers in western Pennsylvania, who used whiskey as an instrument of barter, heroically refused to pay Hamilton’s excise tax, and quite commendably introduced the officials sent to collect it to the decorative uses of hot tar and goose feathers. This uprising was squarely in the hallowed and admirable tradition of patriotic anti-government radicalism that had precipitated the War for Independence.

But where King George III failed to exterminate American radicalism, Hamilton — through his influence with Washington, and his entente with the eastern seaboard mercantilist elite — was successful.

Washington’s decision to assemble and lead an army of 13,000 conscripts to overawe the Whiskey Rebels is the largest stain on his noble biography. It also laid bare the malignant ambition that resided in Hamilton’s breast, and the corruption that festered even then at the heart of the corporatocracy he devised.

Notes DiLorenzo: “The rank-and-file soldiers [in the army assembled by Washington] may have been mostly conscripts, but many of the officers who accompanied Hamilton and Washington to Pennsylvania were `from the ranks of the creditor aristocracy in the seaboard cities…. These officers were eager to enforce collection of the whiskey tax so that the value of their government bond holdings could be enhanced and secured.”

The punitive expedition against the Whiskey Rebels illustrated “why Hamilton was such a vociferous proponent of a standing army,” writes DiLorenzo. “He wanted a standing army of tax collectors. This is how King George III collected stamp taxes and other levies from the American colonists prior to the Revolution, and it is how Hamilton intended to collect his whiskey tax” and any other impositions he could devise.

The new

So it was that, thirteen years after Yorktown, Hamilton and Washington deployed an army larger than the one that defeated the British in that climactic battle in order to validate the central government’s power to shake down the poor and the entrepreneurial class on behalf of wealthy, well-connected political clients.

And Hamilton’s treatment of captured American tax rebels displayed an imperious cruelty eclipsing that displayed by the Brits toward American P.O.W.s.

As DiLorenzo recounts, Hamilton’s army “treated their captives — including `old men who had fought for American independence … some pale and sick’ — most inhumanely. The tax protesters were `run through the snow in chains, toward various lockups in town jails, stables, and cattle pens, to await interrogation by Hamilton.’ This went on all the way across the state of Pennsylvania, until they reached Philadelphia.”

Washington, whose heart was never really in this expedition, made the mistake of leaving Hamilton (of whom he entertained much too high an opinion) in charge, and unsupervised.

This permitted him, in DiLorenzo’s words, to play “the role of Grand Inquisitor,” in which he, as if in anticipation of Gitmo-era proceedings, “`prompted detainees to manufacture evidence’ against his political opponents from Pennsylvania. One of his assistants, a General White, `ordered the beheading of anyone attempting to escape’ and was not overruled by the treasury secretary, who was apparently willing to play judge, jury, and executioner. Indeed, Hamilton ordered local judges to render guilty verdicts against the twenty men who were eventually imprisoned, and he wanted all guilty parties to be hanged.”

Due in no small measure to Washington’s influence, Hamilton’s crusade never reached that bloody fruition. Twelve rebels were prosecuted; two were convicted, and pardoned by Washington. None of them ever paid the abhorrent whiskey tax. This was perhaps the last significant victory against Hamilton’s system.

After his death in 1804, Hamilton’s disciples would succeed — briefly — in creating a central Bank of the United States. A generation later, an otherwise undistinguished Illinois lawyer who made himself wealthy in the service of the Hamiltonian railroad combine would wage a war of consolidation against the South in order to preserve the tax revenues that were indispensable to the corporatist system. That was indeed the causus belli for Lincoln’s war to prevent southern independence, even though the Regime demands that we perceive it to be a sacred crusade to liberate enslaved black people, rather than a conflict intended to make tax slaves out of everybody.

Hamilton’s system reached its full, malignant maturity in 1913 under the unspeakably vile Woodrow Wilson, the presidential sock-puppet of “Colonel” Edward Mandell House — who was himself the instrument of the same creditor class Hamilton had served so faithfully. That year brought about the imposition of the income tax, the creation of the Federal Reserve System, and the effective abolition of the United States Senate (originally designed to protect the interests of the separate states) via the Seventeenth Amendment.

Since that time, Americans have lived under a unitary state fueled by taxation, debt, and inflation, in which the earnings of the middle class are plundered for the benefit of corporate welfare whores. Those living today enjoy the unique, albeit unsettling, blessing of watching the death throes of Hamilton’s system, or at least the post-1971 version of the same.

From Herr Henreich Paulson, the heir to Hamilton’s throne, we hear the same kind of self-contradictory persiflage that littered the various “Reports” Hamilton wrote on behalf of his mercantilist designs. As trillions of dollars are created by the Fed to slop the troughs of Wall Street speculators and their creditors, we are seeing Hamiltonian governance in its purity: The unblushing transfer of wealth from productive private interests into the hands of the politically favored elite.

as the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet KGB, still stands outside the Lubyanka Square headquarters of the “post-Soviet” secret police, Hamilton’s marble likeness resides in front of the Treasury Department Building, headquarters of the agency that oversees our own three-letter terrorist organ, the IRS.

And the abiding cult of the imperial presidency attests to Hamilton’s success in refashioning what was intended to be a modest executive office into a fully realized elected dictatorship.

The unfolding economic collapse is nothing less than an extinction-level event for the dollar system devised by Hamilton. I have no idea what will replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, but the greenback will lose that status very soon — most likely sooner than most of us would suspect.

When that happens, the brutality encoded in the Hamiltonian State’s genotype — recall the forced marches of elderly tax rebels through the snows of Pennsylvania, the coerced confessions and accusations, the threats of beheadings and summary hangings — will manifest itself quite forcefully as it seeks to extract the means of paying its bondholders.

Wisdom dictates that we preserve what we’ve earned by withdrawing from the dollar system (to the extent that we can), learn how to protect it and those close to us from predators both private and public, and find suitable refuge as we witness the death throes of the existing order.

And in preparation for the Second American Revolution, we should read and re-read Thomas DiLorenzo’s enlightening and elegantly written indictment in order to understand how the first one was betrayed.

Kamen no Maid Guy

Gender Crap? Help, Someone Call the Doctor!

Some racist blogs (name these bastards) are gossiping about the 2008 World Economic Assholes Gender Crap Report. And as you know “Gender Crap” is bad, Family is dangerous and World Cultural Diversity is Forbidden. One World, One Rule. If the “World Economic Assholes” said you live in a bad country, then it’s Consecrated Truth… Specially for japan-bashing blogs who refuse to hear that japanese mothers want to take care of their own children.

But wait, Professor Thomas DiLorenzo, Fake Gods Specialist, has just pointed out an interessing video of american economist Thomas Sowell :

Peter Robinson speaks with Thomas Sowell about his new book Economic Facts and Fallacies in which Sowell exposes some of the most popular fallacies about economic issues.

Sowell takes on the conventional thinking on a wide swath of America’s economic life, from male-female economic differences to income stagnation, executive pay, and social mobility to economics of higher education. In all cases he demonstrates how economics relates to the social issues that deeply affect our country.

Thomas Sowell is an American economist, political writer, and commentator. He is currently a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In 1990, he won the Francis Boyer Award, presented by the American Enterprise Institute. In 2002 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal for prolific scholarship melding history, economics, and political science.

Life is a Choice ~ Lady Oscar

A Scholar and a Gentleman goes Ballistic  “American Gothic” in Response the Sellout

Yes, the House has capitulated to the new, improved, pork laced version of the bailout bill.  Proving, with Euclidean clarity, that the American political system no longer represents the people but is beholden to the financial elites  (plus some other elites, oil, military…the list goes on.)

Economist and scholar Thomas DiLorenzo, writing on the Lew Rockwell blog has expressed a reaction that goes a tad beyond his usual mild (guffaw) scholarly rebuffs of the federal state:

“I just returned from Home Depot where I bought the biggest pitchfork that they had.  I’m soaking some rags with kerosine, to be wrapped around a broom handle and then set on fire.  Then I’m heading down to the Baltimore-Washington parkway to D.C..   I’m hoping a large crowd will follow my example.”

Unfortunately I live far from the Baltimore-Washington D.C. parkway…but if the weather is as nice there as it is here today it would be a wonderful time to go for a stroll!

Interviewed by Brian Lamb on C-SPAN’s “Q & A” television program, Dr. DiLorenzo discusses Lincoln, academia, and his two books: “The Real Lincoln” and “Lincoln Unmasked”. [Editor's note: History unfolds in an hour interview that will make a number of things fall in place to the keen listener/sc]

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Thomas J DiLorenzo, author of “The Real Lincoln” is interviewed on C-SPAN.

I encourage everyone to look into the real history of this deified politician and how his actions led to much of the overreaching of the federal government today.

If you have not heard of Dr. DiLorenzo this interview on C-SPAN is worth watching.

Technorati Tags: History, Thomas DiLorenzo, Lincoln

‘May his days be few; may another take his office!’  ~ Psalm 109:8

It is not so unusual to be angered at a moment when you least expect it.  In fact, it is usually because we are not expecting it that we become angered so easily.  Still, there are moments we are caught unawares with anger resulting.

Such happened to me this afternoon as I prepared to substitute for Kevin at Covenant Kids.  The question for the evening begins the section regarding the Lord’s Prayer, more specifically, the first petition, ‘Hallowed by Thy name.’  [Update: It turns out that we studied the Lord's Supper but I must have misheard Kevin on the phone.]  For those who know me, it will come as nothing new to learn that I thoroughly enjoy studying the catechisms.  (I am partial to the Westiminster Larger Catechism, but the Shorter and other Reformed catechisms are a joy as well.)  So, you can imagine my surprise when I came across the following commentary on the question and answer:

Let us illustrate [the point]: Shorty stands with silent respect before the great statue of Abraham Lincoln.  Why is this so?  There is a good reason.  He has studied American history.  He has learned much about this man.  The name itself would have no meaning for a child who knew no history.  But it has deep meaning for Shorty.

At this point, I was unsure whether to lose my lunch or cry.  (To be fair, I have no intention of defaming the catechisms.  The bone I have to pick is with G. I. Williamson’s commentary upon this particular question in the Shorter Catechism–which is a significant caveat!)  Forget the implied idolatry involved in revering any statue (much less that of a war criminal).  But the maddening aspect of such an errant example is that any child (or adult) who has studied history–really studied history and not the nonsense which is spoon-fed to most children based on myth and nationalistic agenda–should hold absolutely no reverence for the likes of Abraham Lincoln!

He destroyed the U.S. Constitution, waged an illegal war (against innocent non-combatants as well), and was hardly the Christian he is portrayed as having been.  Oh, yeah–and he did not free a single slave.  In fact, he advocated colonisation–sending all Negroes to Africa.

Sadly, a misplaced reverence for (Dis)Honest Abe is prevalent in our populace.  If folks really studied history–and were honest with the data–they would/ should have a radically different opinion of that man.  (DiLorenzo’s tour de force The Real Lincoln or his most recent treatment of the subject Lincoln Unmasked are great places to begin.)

I issue a challenge: Put forth a reason or reasons Lincoln should receive our approbation, and I will explain why I think the opposite is the case.  It is really not hard to do, actually.

Here is another example of what an errant–or ignorant–understanding of history can do.  ‘Gone With the Wind: The Musical.’  (The fact that they butchered one of the best novels ever written in this manner is a debate for another day.)  I was tempted to give them a bit of a pass; after all, they are Englishmen.  But then I read this miserable excuse for a synopsis from the playbill:

The story is set in 1860’s Atlanta, Georgia, in the period of the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Period that followed. 17-year-old Scarlett, on the brink of womanhood, is the eldest of three daughters living a life of luxury on their father’s plantation Tara. President Lincoln demands the end of slavery in the South, and the Civil War begins. Scarlett’s journey through both the war and the following peace is mirrored in her turbulent relationship with Rhett Butler, whose actions always defy prediction.

Blech.