DiLorenzo's Fake Lincoln

Some weeks back I was in an online discussion about good Lincoln biographies. The book that received the most mentions was The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, by Thomas DiLorenzo. Some brief internet searching revealed that the book is quite controversial and has been charged with gross distortion of history. Nevertheless, I was morbidly curious enough to read it myself.

DiLorenzo's stated goal is to get past the "myths" of Lincoln that he believes is all too common and reveal the truth about the man. (p. 1-2) Yet despite his claims, DiLorenzo actually fails to uncover anything particularly novel about our sixteenth president. Instead, he does the opposite, and in so doing becomes the very type of historian he decries. He presents an abridged history, selectively using events, quotes, and supporting scholars to further his thesis driven work. In fact, DiLorenzo identifies nothing about Lincoln's views of  race, southern succession, national unity, or methods of emancipation that is not addressed with greater care and context in Doris Kearns Goodwin's much superior Team of Rivals. In comparison, The Real Lincoln reminds me of a rushed college paper where all facts must be squeezed into the neatly predetermined premise and no argument should be examined too closely.

The thesis is quite simple. Too simple. Abraham Lincoln began the Civil War to further the centralized "American System," which he identifies as the combination of a protective tariff, internal improvements (subsidies, particularly for railroads), and a national bank. Addressing the issue of slavery was merely a means to that end. In fact, DiLorenzo goes so far as to conclude that subsidizing railroads "seems more and more like the sole reason the Republican Party was created in the first place." (p. 222-23)

DiLorenzo's historical errors have been addressed elsewhere and elsewhere. They could, and did, fill an entire book. Even a sympathetic reviewer concluded: "The Real Lincoln is a travesty of historical method and documentation. Exasperating, maddening, and deeply disappointing." These reviewers have quite adequately pointed out the worst errors concerning Lincoln. I want to focus on the errors concerning Lincoln's world.

First of all, DiLorenzo repeatedly accuses Lincoln of subverting or ignoring the Constitution. Yet his constitutional reasoning makes me wonder if  he has ever carefully read the document or if he simply uses the term "unconstitutional" for anything he doesn't like.For example, DiLorenzo faults Lincoln for:

ignor[ing] the economic logic of the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution, which--in order to guarantee free interstate commerce--made it illegal for one state to impose a tariff on goods imported from another state. If free trade among states is a good idea--and it is--it is just as good an idea with regard to international trade. This was the thinking of the framers of the idea as well. Jefferson and Washington, for example, were staunch advocates of free international commerce as well as interstate commerce. (p. 69-70)

Yet he fails to mention that tariffs on international commerce are explicitly permitted by the Constitution (Article 1, section 1, clause 1) and one of the first major acts passed by the new Congress was the Tariff Act of 1789, which was signed into law by President Washington.

Likewise, DiLorenzo labels the whole "American System" (tariffs, banking, and subsidies) "mercantilist" (p. 56) and favorably references the "constitutional arguments" made against such a system by "Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Tyler and others." (p. 234). Yet he never informs his readers that John Marshal, himself a member of the founding generation and delegate to the Virginia ratification convention, wrote a unanimous opinion for the Supreme Court finding that chartering a national bank was a proper exercise of the power to regulate interstate commerce. Instead, DiLorenzo leaves the reader with the distinct impression that both tariffs and the bank are obvious unconstitutional overreaches of federal power.

Much ink is also shed over Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, but despite that ink the reader would not know that the Constitution says: "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." (Article 1, section 9, clause 2.) Nor is the reader told that despite this same phrase's appearance in the Confederate Constitution, Jefferson Davis also suspended habeas corpus and other civil liberties. Failure to even engage the constitution text does not make for a strong constitutional argument. For those truly interested in a serious discussion of the habeas corpus suspension, as well as other constitutional questions from the era, see Mark Neely's Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War.

DiLorenzo's Constitutional double standard is further on show in his discussion of internal improvement subsidies. Somehow, after railing against the corruption that invariably accompanies internal improvement subsidies (not to mention his skepticism of their constitutionality),  DiLorenzo faults Lincoln for not adopting a method of compensated emancipation. Apart from the fact that Lincoln and the Republicans had initially pursued that avenue with no cooperation from the states, such a measure would be subject to the exact same criticisms that DiLorenzo had for other subsidy systems. Yet for DiLorenzo, no stick seems too poor to beat Lincoln. By this point, he looks less like lady justice blindly weighing the facts and more like a blindfolded child wildly waving a stick at a piñata.

Apart from his stilted view of the Constitution, DiLorenzo also repeatedly demonstrates that he has little knowledge of pre-Lincoln American history. In an odd twist, the author who claims to be giving a closer look than anyone else to one of our most famous Presidents has failed to look closely at anyone else. DiLorenzo paints the American founding as a libertarian happy place marred only by the existence of Alexander Hamilton and his ilk.  In his portrayal, all the founding fathers (except Hamilton) believed in right of succession/revolt against oppression (except for slaves), in freedom and liberty (except for slaves), in free markets (with slave labor), and in strong restrictions on the use of state authority (except for runaway slaves). Lurking in the shadows were Alexander Hamilton, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay, held at bay by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, and John Calhoun. Lincoln finally accomplished what Hamilton etc. could only dream about, the destruction of the federalist system.

That the loose confederation model of voluntary enforcement did not work under the Articles of Confederation is apparently an irrelevant detail. As is Jefferson's complete absence from the Constitutional Convention. As is the passage of tariffs and chartering of national bank by the very first Congress. As is the early passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts (DiLorenzo calls their "quick[]" abandonment a demonstration of how the foundation generation "jealously protected rights," (p. 131) but does does not bother to enlighten us what their initial adoption a mere 11 years after the Constitution was ratified means). Lincoln is even blamed for the ill treatment of Native Americans that took place in the wars after his death (and some during his administration), while Andrew Jackson is somehow lionized for his proper view of government with no mention made of his awful Indian policies.

Lincoln is routinely weighed against those who DiLorenzo believes are the truly great presidents, Jefferson, Madison, and Jackson, and found wanting. But it takes little more than a basic knowledge of these other presidents to realize that DiLorenzo's standard is one of convenience, not history. Madison's co-authorship of the Federalist Papers with Hamilton is hardly mentioned. Lincoln is chastised for his eagerness for war, but Madison's War of 1812 (pushed for by Calhoun) is also not mentioned. And there is not even attempt to reconcile Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase with DiLorenzo's version of Jefferson as a strict adherent to limited spending and executive power.

But the oddest historical oversight is DiLorenzo's treatment of Andrew Jackson. DiLorenzo holds up Jackson as one of the strongest supports of states rights, including the right of states to nullify federal laws and secede from the Union. Apparently, he has either never heard of or didn't think it worthwhile to mention the Nullification Crisis in 1832--the incident where Jackson was on the verge of ordering federal troops into South Carolina to enforce federal laws. Madison likewise stated during this time that South Carolina was in the wrong. In the lead up to the Civil War, Lincoln looked to Jackson for guidance on how to respond to rogue states. Jon Meacham addresses this in detail in American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. Yet ignoring all this, DiLorenzo tells his readers that "Thomas Jefferson was perhaps the most articulate defender of states' rights, followed by Andrew Jackson..."(p. 261) Yet for all DiLorenzo's rhetoric, I'd put $5.01 on Lincoln in any debate between him and DiLorenzo over a proper understanding of Jackson's legacy.

Towards the end of the book, we get a fascinating glimpse of DiLorenzo's dizzying intellect, which I will quote in its entirety to avoid any accusations of tampering. He speculates that had Lincoln allowed the southern states to peacefully leave,

[a]fter a number of years, the same reasons that led the colonists to form a Union in the first place would likely have become more appealing to both sections, and the Union would probably have been reunited. 

After that, knowing that secession was a real threat, the federal government would have stuck closer to its constitutional bearings. The mere threat of peaceful secession would have had that effect on it. Its imperialistic tendencies and the large tax increases necessary to finance such adventures would have been checked. We may never have had a Spanish-American War. We may also have never had a president like Woodrow Wilson, who was so eager to involve Americans in a foreign war. Economist Han-Hermann Hoppe argues in a recent book that if America had not intervened in World War I, the European monarchies would have eventually worked out a peace agreement that was not so punishing on Germany, and that may have even precluded the rise of the Nazi Party, which itself was partly a reaction to the Versailles treaty of World War I. (p. 272-73)

Yes, DiLorenzo traces the Holocaust back to Abraham Lincoln. But why stop with Lincoln? This sort of reasoning can trace infinitely back to any person. Which only demonstrates how malleable and faulty this sort of historical analysis is.

DiLorenzo opened his book claiming that "much of what has been written about Lincoln is a myth." (p. 1) Whether true or not of others, DiLorenzo ensures that it is a self-fulfilling prophecy for his own work, not only for Lincoln but also for the Constitution, the founding generation, and Andrew Jackson. His premise is simply too neat and tidy to be considered a serious history.

Locke and Marx's dilemna

In our Cold War and post Cold War world, capitalism and communism, freedom and tyranny, and democracy and Marxism are viewed as clashing opposites.

Yet in 1922, Roscoe Pound observed that Karl Marx, the father of modern socialism and communism, and John Locke, one of the fathers of modern democracy, actually viewed property the same way. For background, Pound was the Dean of Harvard Law School from 1916 to 1936 and is one of the most cited legal scholars of the 20th century. Writing about theories of property, Pound makes the following observation:

This controversy as to the respective claims of him who creates by labor and him who furnishes the materials goes back to the Roman jurists of the classical period. The Proculians awarded the thing made to the maker because as such it had not existed previously. The Sabinians awarded it to the owner of the materials because without materials the new thing could not have been made. In the maturity of Roman law a compromise was made, and various compromises have obtained ever since. In modern times, however, the claim of him who creates has been urged by a long line of writers beginning with Locke and culminating in the socialists.

This passage led me back to both Marx and Locke, to see if Pound's accusation was true.

Locke, in establishing a construct for the foundation of property, focuses on labor. "Nor is it so strange, as perhaps before consideration it may appear, that the property of labour should be able to over-balance the community of land: for it is labour indeed that puts the difference of value on every thing." And again: "Thus labour, in the beginning, gave a right of property, wherever any one was pleased to employ it upon what was common, which remained a long while the far greater part, and is yet more than mankind makes use of." For Locke, it is the act (labor) of taking things out of common ownership, whether it be picking apples or tilling land, that creates the right to that thing taken or improved. "As much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils, so much he may by his labour fix a property in: whatever is beyond this, is more than his share, and belongs to others."

Turning next to Marx, we find that once again Pound's observation is correct. Marx casts history as a conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The former were the embodiment of capital, the latter of labor. His complaint was that laborers were unable to own property because the means of production were entirely controlled by the capitalists--capital and not labor determined ownership.

The result was the creation of "the modern working class, developed—a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market." Accordingly, he concluded, "The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property." He challenges the idea that property ownership is based in the supplying of capital, and instead seeks to recreate a society that places it with labor.

So what changed between Locke and Marx? They both have the same foundational interpretation of perpetuity ownership, yet one sought social stability and the other for social revolution. Let me suggest that it is in their assumptions. Or, more accurately, it lies in the assumptions of the world in which they wrote and its changing purpose of law.

To illustrate this, we return to Pound. Pound postulated that the law at various times has been viewed with different purposes. During the Middle Ages, it existed to keep society stable--to keep people in their social places. This view was challenged in the age of exploration and colorization. New continents and new resources meant that conservation and perpetuation were no longer primary goals. Instead, "Men did not so much desire that others perform for them the duties owing in some relation, as that others keep hands off while they achieved what they might for themselves in a world that continually afforded new opportunities to the active and the daring. [...] Accordingly, the end of law comes to be conceived as a making possible of the maximum of individual free self-assertion."

I found it fascinating that in this view, libertarianism is a by-product of the temporary western experience a vast and sudden change in geography. Ideas of limits and place and scale and proportionality were subordinated to the self-made man. And the world was such that the self-made man was an actual opportunity for many.

But--and there is a huge catch--what happens when the limit is found to the new limitless world? How does a society determine property ownership when there is no unowned continent or resource pile from which to extract property? As Pound describes, the law then turned back toward a more Medieval idea of conservation and equity:

When this last stage in the development of the idea of law as existing to promote or permit the maximum of free individual self-assertion had been reached, the juristic possibilities of the conception had been exhausted. There were no more continents to discover. Natural resources had been discovered and exploited and the need was for conservation of what remained available.

Once the common stock is all divided, under Lock's mode, all that is left is reshuffling. Those whose ancestors did not labor, or who lost the fruits of their labor, have no starting ownership and have difficulty obtaining it. A model that started out with ownership based on labor results in one based only on inherited property. This is exactly the social shortcoming Marx identified, referring to it as the bourgeoisie control of the "means of production". Marx's critique largely boils down to the observation that the opportunities assumed by Lock no longer existed and an attempt to restore them. However, Marx failed to realize that he was merely calling for a turning back of the Lockean clock, not a new construct of property ownership.

Enter Adam Smith, writing almost exactly between Locke and Marx. Like Locke and Marx, Smith also based original property ownership in labor: "Labour was the first price, the original purchase money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased." Yet he recognized that a time would come when there was no more common stock to pull property from, and labor would become subordinate:

As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them. He must then pay for the licence to gather them, and must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labour either collects or produces. This portion, or, what comes to the same thing, the price of this portion, constitutes the rent of land, and in the price of the greater part of commodities, makes a third component part. [...] As soon as land becomes private property, the landlord demands a share of almost all the produce which the labourer can either raise or collect from it. His rent makes the first deduction from the produce of the labour which is employed upon land.

Smith recognizes, but is also somewhat critical of, this effect of landlords imposing "rent" on what was previously the act of the laborer to create ownership. Yet he recognizes the the price of value of a thing is not based on labor alone, but also on the "rent" payed to the owner of the means of production (his third component is "profit.") In language that sounds like an early echo of Marx's clash of bourgeoisie and proletariat, Smith observes that the non-landowning laborer is at a distinct disadvantage in this new balance of economic power.

What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little, as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower, the wages of labour. It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily: and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit, their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes, the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks, which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year, without employment. In the long run, the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.

Smith concludes that for a society to be continually improving, it must seek to improve "circumstances of the lower ranks of the people". "No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged." Accordingly, for Smith, good treatment of the working class is both a requirement and a reflection of a society that is increasing its collective wealth. And failure to treat the laborers well is a reflection of a stagnant or declining economy. 

In short, sixty years after Locke, Smith saw the potential shortcomings of a purely Lockean perspective, and sought to warn against it. Seventy years after Smith, however, Marx observed in practice what Smith had warned against in theory: that an inequitable treatment of the workers would lead to decline. Marx took that one step further and added revolution.

Marx embraced the revolution, believing it would solve the imbalance. Yet he still suffered from Locke's optimism and belief that labor alone was a sufficient bases for an ongoing theory of property. He failed to see what Smith (and, according to Pound, the Roman jurists) had previously realized: that the disappearance of a common stock of land and resources necessitated modification of the model of property ownership--one that balanced labor and capital. Marx was still operating in the self-made man world. He failed to identify the root cause of the working class problem, and as a result, when his theories were implemented they created wealth imbalances greater and quicker than what he reacted against. His self-made men were tyrants.

Quiz: Who Said It?

Since the Mao Tse-Tung question was so popular, I thought I'd do another.

I came across these following passages in a book by someone you all should recognize.

In that original state of things which precedes both the appropriation of land and the accumulation of stock, the whole produce of labour belongs to the labourer. [….] As soon as land becomes private property, the landlord demands a share of almost all the produce which the labourer can either raise or collect from it. His rent makes the first deduction from the produce of the labour which is employed upon land.

* * *

What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little, as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower, the wages of labour. It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily: and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit, their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes, the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks, which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year, without employment. In the long run, the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.

* * *

Is this improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people to be regarded as an advantage, or as an inconveniency, to the society? The answer seems at first abundantly plain. Servants, labourers, and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part, can never be regarded as any inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.

* * *

It deserves to be remarked, perhaps, that it is in the progressive state, while the society is advancing to the further acquisition, rather than when it has acquired its full complement of riches, that the condition of the labouring poor, of the great body of the people, seems to be the happiest and the most comfortable. It is hard in the stationary, and miserable in the declining state. The progressive state is, in reality, the cheerful and the hearty state to all the different orders of the society; the stationary is dull; the declining melancholy.

* * *

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

* * *

Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters.

I'll update this page tomorrow with the author. In the meantime, leave your best guess either in the comments below or on our Facebook page.







_____________

Answer: Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

Answer to Quiz: Who Believed It?

This was originally scheduled for tomorrow morning, but in light of the discussion yesterday I've decided to lift the suspense and reveal the answer early. Yesterday I posted a personal moral code that I recently came across and asked if anyone could guess who said it. As a recap, here's the quote again:

____ attitude to morality consisted of one core, the self, "I," above everything else: "I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one's actions has to be benefiting others. Morality does not have to be defined in relation to others . . . People like me want to . . . satisfy our hearts to the full, and in doing so we automatically have the most valuable moral codes. Of course there are people and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me." 

____ shunned all constraints of responsibility and duty. "People like me only have a duty to ourselves; we have no duty to other people." "I am responsible only for the reality that I know," ___ wrote, "and absolutely not responsible for anything else. I don't know about the past, I don't know about the future. They have nothing to do with the reality of my own self." ____ explicitly rejected any responsibility towards future generations. "Some say one has a responsibility for history. I don't believe it. I am only concerned about developing myself . . . I have my desire and act on it. I am responsible to no one." 

____did not believe in anything unless he could benefit from it personally. A good name after death, __ said, "cannot bring me any joy, because it belongs to the future and not to my own reality." "People like me are not building achievements to leave for future generations." __ did not care what __ left behind. 

* * * 

As conscience always implies some concern for other people, and is not a corollary of hedonism, __ was rejecting the concept. ___ view was: "I do not think these [commands like 'do not kill,' 'do not steal' and 'do not slander'] have to do with conscience. I think they are only out of self-interest for self preservation." All considerations must "be purely calculation for oneself, and absolutely not for obeying external ethical codes, or for so-called feelings of responsibility..."

The answer is not Ayn Rand (who it reminded me, and several readers, of), nor any other libertarian philosopher. It's not an American, or even a Westerner. Yet it is the sort of statement that could have come straight from the mouth of John Galt.

It was Mao Tse-Tung, the Chinese communist revolutionary and dictator. The quote is excerpted from Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang.

At Patrick Henry College I had a professor who asserted in class one day that libertarianism and Marxism were actually ideologically related--they both reduced everything to economics, which in turn reduces everything to self-interest. This quote is just another example of the insightfulness of that observation.

Quiz: Who Believed It?

I recently came across the following description of someone's personal moral belief system.

____ attitude to morality consisted of one core, the self, "I," above everything else: "I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one's actions has to be benefiting others. Morality does not have to be defined in relation to others . . . People like me want to . . . satisfy our hearts to the full, and in doing so we automatically have the most valuable moral codes. Of course there are people and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me." 

____ shunned all constraints of responsibility and duty. "People like me only have a duty to ourselves; we have no duty to other people." "I am responsible only for the reality that I know," ___ wrote, "and absolutely not responsible for anything else. I don't know about the past, I don't know about the future. They have nothing to do with the reality of my own self." ____ explicitly rejected any responsibility towards future generations. "Some say one has a responsibility for history. I don't believe it. I am only concerned about developing myself . . . I have my desire and act on it. I am responsible to no one." 

____did not believe in anything unless he could benefit from it personally. A good name after death, __ said, "cannot bring me any joy, because it belongs to the future and not to my own reality." "People like me are not building achievements to leave for future generations." __ did not care what __ left behind. 

* * * 

As conscience always implies some concern for other people, and is not a corollary of hedonism, __ was rejecting the concept. ___ view was: "I do not think these [commands like 'do not kill,' 'do not steal' and 'do not slander'] have to do with conscience. I think they are only out of self-interest for self preservation." All considerations must "be purely calculation for oneself, and absolutely not for obeying external ethical codes, or for so-called feelings of responsibility..."

I was originally going to do an examination into these ideas, but instead decided to try a quiz. I've intentionally left out the name and pronoun for this person. Can anyone guess said this? Leave a comment either here or on our Facebook page.

Click here for the answer.

The simplest, most coherent, and most sensible explanation for the current economic condition

With a title like that, you should expect some long drawn out post. If so, you'll be disappointed. Instead, you get two quotes.

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy. -Ernest Benn 

An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living. -Nicholas Chamfort

In our case, the politicians and the economists got together and gave us ... whatever it is we have. And you thought it was complicated.

The Atlantic recently had a longer article with pretty much the same conclusion.

Ayn Rand: Romantic?

Some time ago I came across this critique of Atlas Shrugged, which I just rediscovered while going through my partially-written posts. While the whole thing is good, the following excerpt is particularly striking:

Since I brought up human nature, there is also the matter of the thinness of Rand's anthropology. Rand's basic assertion is the rationality of human beings. (To the extent that a person is irrational, he is regarded as evil, anti-mind and anti-life.) And it is this conception of the human being as a rational, thinking being which leads to her ideal of the productive genius, his happiness, and the political order that would protect and preserve it. For Rand, the state only exists to shield the rational from the irrational, the good and the strong from ravenous desires of the wicked and the weak.

Of course, other rationalists have drawn strikingly different conclusions. In this regard, it useful to note that much serious political philosophy proceeds from a completely different premise -- the imperfect rationality of human beings -- and rightly so. If one considers Hobbes, say, or Spinoza, or Locke, three of the thinkers who inaugurated modern liberalism, one will notice that the fundamental problem of social life is that human beings are driven by their passions and their imaginations, by their hopes and their fears. It is these passions that create the problems and tensions that point to the need for stable political organization. While it is reason that leads them to enter into civil society -- to escape from the inconveniences of the state of nature -- the political order arranged is one that must take human beings as they are and not as the best they could be. This could be an authoritarian state, as it was for Hobbes, or a liberal democracy, as it was for Spinoza. In both cases, however, there is the recognition that human beings are passionate creatures, that the state is needed because of the problems inherent in human nature, that these problems may be alleviated somewhat in civil society but they won't go away.

Ironically, when one mulls it over, one may find that it's Galt and his band of strikers and dropouts who prove to be driven by their passions. Galt especially, who, despite his ultra-handsome looks and heroic self-understanding, can't muster up the gumption to just go up to the woman he has a massive crush on and ask her out for a drink -- or at least just talk to her -- and instead sits around chatting up her poor, love-struck assistant, hoping to catch a glimpse into her life.

Is this rational action, heroic action?

No, I think not. And aside from being somewhat creepy, it underscores the true impotence of Rand's hero. And it's not only with Dagny. When faced with the "communist" takeover of the motor factory, Galt doesn't seek out the banker Midas Mulligan and ask for a loan so that he can develop his motor on his own or attempt a run for political office; he just takes his toys and goes into hiding, hoping by such action to help hasten the apocalypse. This seems to me to be more like the behavior of a petulant adolescent than of the "highest man." Galt longs for a total transformation of human society, a complete victory for his higher morality and the unconditional surrender of those who oppose him, and he is content, indeed happy, to watch everything be destroyed to get there.

And the attempt to flee from reality courses through Rand's novel, from the disappeared and the destructive activities of Francisco D'Anconia and Ragnar Danneskjöld to Dangy's fruitless affair with Hank to the libertarian fantasyland of Galt's Gulch. Despite all of their speeches and protestations, these people are not so much stern rationalists but romantics. Such characters make terrible role models for those of us who are forced to reside in the world, which just may not be the stage for the struggle between the looting mystics and heroic individuals, but a place infinitely more complex, and more interesting. (Also, we should keep in mind that it is people convinced of their superior rationality and gnostic insights into the direction of world-historical change that generally pose the greatest challenge to the stability of the political order.)

Thoughts?

Why the Christians?

Lately I have been confronted multiple times by a simple truth: in some of the darkest places of the world, it is the Christians who are refusing to give up on their fellow man.

In Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, It is the bishop’s kindness and forgiveness that brings Valjean to repentance—and  sets the stage for the remainder of the story. But it is a bishop, a man of God, and not the innkeeper, or the policeman, or the mayor, or any other secular figure that, by that one act of kindness, changes this man’s life. That, I think, is significant.

Being fiction, that story is easy enough to dismiss. What I have kept finding, though, is similar examples that are not fiction. And those examples shed even additional light on Hugo's story.

For my Immigration Law Clinic this semester I was assigned the book Enrique’s Journey, which tells of a sixteen year old boy’s harrowing journey from Honduras to the United States. Along the way he rode on top of cargo trains, avoiding both Mexican authorities and the gangs. He was beaten, robbed, and deported out of Mexico numerous times. Many like him are murdered.

Virtually the only help he received along his journey was in towns where the local priest had impressed into the church the importance of helping the train people. And the priests themselves take a lead role. In one town:

Perhaps the greatest gift has come from the church’s priest. Over his lifetime, he has saved $37,500 to live on during his retirement. He told the church members, “These people will keep on coming, more and more. We must build.” Then, when he was sixty-three years old, he quietly donated the entire amount to buy the land to build the migrant shelter.

There was also a recent article in The Atlantic about Christian surgeons in Africa, going to help those in areas where there is little to no medical infrastructure. The entire article is excellent, but this part about the program's expansion stood out:

"About three or four years ago we were tying to get a program in Ethiopia, and one of the government ministers was very much against this," Steffes told me, explaining that the minister's objection centered on the organization's unwillingness to accept non-Christian trainees. "He said, 'tell me what you're doing here.' And I said, 'the truth is that we've put out a number of graduates and they're all serving in rural Africa or in the cities where no one wants to work, and I'm willing to share everything I've got, from academics to teaching to testing. You can have them.' And I paused, and said, 'But it won't do any good.' I said, 'the only reason I can get these people going out in these rural areas and serve in places where they have trouble getting a decent education for their kids, not have all the amenities of a city, not get paid well, is because they're doing what they think Jesus wants them to do. Without that, it doesn't work. You can't convince other people to do this.'" The minister, Steffes said, removed the roadblocks impeding the program. "He just looked at me for a few seconds, and said, 'You're right,' and he finished the conversation."

Only the Christians stay to help. “You can't convince other people to do this.”

This is no coincidence. Tim Chester, in his excellent book A Meal With Jesus, explains:

Involvement with people, especially the marginalized, must begin with a sense of God’s grace. But not just God’s grace to them, but his grace to me. I need to be melted and broken by grace. When I speak with someone who’s an alcoholic or a single mother, or someone who’s depressed or unemployed or unemployable, I must do so as a fellow sinner. We’re all broken people in a broken world. If I do not understand this, then my good intentions will be patronizing. Anything I say will be heard as “become like me.” Only as I’m daily struck by God’s amazing grace to me, Tim Chester, will my life and words point to Jesus as the Savior.

Christians have that sense of grace, which is why they are so often the ones stepping up to help the ex-convicts, the travelers, and the otherwise unreached.

I’ll close, as I opened, with Victor Hugo. Javert did not grasp this grace, and when it chased him down, “An entire new world appeared to his soul . . . the possibility of a tear in the eye of the law, a mysterious justice according to God going counter to justice according to men.” Grace undid his worldview, and by extension, undid him.

The humble bishop, in contrast (and in a description that continues to haunt me), “had no systems; but many deeds. … Certainly these tremendous reveries have their moral use; and by those arduous routes there is an approach to ideal perfection. But for his part, he took the straight road, which is short—the Gospel. … His humble soul loved; that was all.”

Are capitalism and communism related?

The first articles from John Medaille that I remember reading were his five part series on distributism. Since then, I’ve always learned something from his articles on the economy (whether I agree or not). This past week’s article was no different. In a speech entitled “Why Isn’t Romania Rich?”, Medaille goes far beyond Romania and discusses the “science” of economics as a whole:

[L]et me point to a curious parallel. In the last days of the tyrant’s reign, Ceauşescu starved his people to pay the foreign debt. Now, look at the situation in Europe today, and we find that the solution proposed for Greece is that she should starve her people to pay the foreign debt. That is to say, what Communism accomplished with tanks and the Securitate, finance capitalism accomplishes with bonds and bankers. 

* * * 

This leads us to note a curious parallel between the universalism of Marx and the globalism of the capitalists. For both, place and culture meant nothing; global capitalism, like international communism, knows no limits and recognizes no borders. Is it not fair to ask if Brussels is home to a Fourth Internationale, with lyrics provided by Goldman-Sachs, to a tune played on a cash register, and accompaniment by the unholy trinity of the World Bank, the WTO, and the European Central Bank? As the Marxist critic Slavoj Žižek, noted, “Socialism failed because it was ultimately a subspecies of capitalism…Marx’s notion of Communist society is itself the inherent capitalist fantasy.”
The parallels with this Fourth International and its crude predecessors can be startling. For example, the communists gathered production into vast collectives, conglomerates that shut down any competing source of production and political power, and concentrated effective ownership in the hands of the bureaucrats. But in the capitalist world, production is gathered into vast conglomerates, which are collectives which shut down any competing source of production and political power, and concentrate effective ownership in the hands of the bureaucrats. 

* * * 

The attempt to eliminate ethics from economics created a world that was devoid of both social justice and economic order. Having abandoned any objective standards of truth and justice, there was simply no way to resolve the disputes between the contending views, which now became, not science, but pure ideologies. Lacking any recognition of some common good, the only way to resolve disputes between the contending schools of thought was by violence, and as ideologies became nationalized, ideology meant war. It is no accident that the 20th century, the most ideological century in history, was also the bloodiest century in history. 

* * * 

What is needed is new thinking, by which I mean old thinking—that is, ancient truths—applied to new situations. I think it is time to end the 20th century’s disastrous experiment with economics as a pure science and return to the older idea of political economy as a humane science. There are three things that differentiate political economy from economics, and they are justice, purpose, and property. Justice (taken here as an economic notion) is necessary for the proper balance of supply and demand; a stated purpose is necessary to be able to reach a judgment about economic systems; and property is the most basic of all economic relationships.

The entire thing is worth reading, especially for anyone interested in economic thought.

Justice: Adam Smith and Christian Capitalism

Together, specialization and division of labor form the core of Adam Smith's Capitalism. This isn't just when it comes to producing products; it can also apply to services. Recently, a libertarian-leaning friend of mine implied that we wouldn't need police if everyone had a gun and the willingness to take action when wronged.


Although that line of thinking is consistent with the recent Libertarian reinterpretation of Capitalism, it is not in line with true Capitalism. In fact, that kind of thought completely discounts the core of Capitalism. 


Based on the simple concept of division of labor, a government police force is a great idea. 


I don't want to run around punishing people who injure me or take my stuff:  

1. I don't have time. 
2. I don't have the skills. 
3. As the person wronged, I might be able to exact revenge (I’m not a bad shot), but without a neutral party, it is doubtful that real justice would be served.  

Adam Smith, the founder of Capitalism, devised a system based strongly on Biblical thought. 


He knew that God established Government to do exactly what Capitalism proscribes: to be the party that specializes in punishment of the wicked (Romans 13:4). I can’t personally enact punishment on my own behalf when my job is forgive and, in fact, give them my shirt if they steal my cloak (Luke 6:29). 


A Modern Christian Libertarian-minded person who prefers Ayn Rand to Adam Smith might point out that the Bible includes community judgment for crimes in the form of villagers stoning a convicted criminal. They might see this as support for citizens taking the punishment of criminals into their own hands.


I think that is a sloppy application of scripture. The parts of the Bible that contain village stonings also prohibit eating bacon. That part of scripture applied to the Jews under the Old Covenant (a time when they lived under a theocracy, and remember, the Old Testament theocracy ended in exile--it wasn't sufficient to save them).


Christ fulfilled the old Law (St. Paul explains this in detail in Galatians) and Jesus himself showed that Law's fatal flaw when he was asked to participate in one of those village executions and instead said “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” (John 8:7).


St. Paul says, the Law of Moses is a schoolmaster to lead us to Christ (Galatians 3:24). It is not a model of what a government ought to look like. In fact, it resulted in "everyone [doing] what was right in his own eyes." (Judges 21:25). In short, the Law was designed to show that we are not good enough to rule ourselves. 


At its  heart, libertarianism denies any proper role for government. Like communism, it longs for the gradual withering away of the state. But government is something that God ordained to curb to our sinful natures and prevent us from harming our neighbors. Both libertarianism and communism deny that human nature is inclined toward sin.


God established Government to rein-in the problems with human nature. Adam Smith's Capitalism took the principles of human nature and applied them to society. I am amazed at how smart Adam Smith was. The Wealth of Nations contains a wealth of knowledge and I encourage anyone who is serious about economics to read what Smith actually says. Because of how Capitalism has been hijacked by Libertarian-minded theories, I found it greatly helpful to return to the source and begin rebuilding from there. Libertarianism strips away the moral foundation for capitalism, which recognized the human condition, and reduces capitalism to a social Darwinist economic model. That is not what Adam Smith advocated.

Post by Jeremiah Lorrig 


For more on Adam Smith check out our post on  Adam Smith and Farmer Boy.

Beyond economics

This semester I am taking a class on “Law and Economics,” which promises to explain the various economic theories and how they impact the field of law. Although I’m afraid that it will remind me that I like economics from a distance, but easily become somewhat repulsed when I get too close to it. Economics too often reduces everything, especially people, to material things, and those things to artificial currency. There is something dehumanizing about that. As Goethe noted:

When scholars study a thing, they strive,

To kill it first, if it’s alive;

Then they have the parts and they’ve lost the whole,

For the link that’s missing was the living soul.

-Faust, Part one (David Luke trans.)

My first reading assignment started no different. It was full of the stereotypical economic terms like desire, goods, wants, demand, force, resources, happiness, relationship, scarcity, human experience, want, methods -- in short, words that economics stole from physics or metaphysics.

But then the author included some caveats, two of which inspired this post.

In discussing the transition from natural resources to capital (or created) resources, the author stated that “one is almost tempted to carry this reasoning a step further” and apply it to people; specifically, to an educated labor force. “Nevertheless” the author continues, “economists do not classify people as capital resources.” They are something different.

Now, hold that thought while I go into the other point.

In the very next paragraph, the author states that “capital resources, as the term is used in this book, do not include financial capital, such as money, stocks, deeds, or bonds. . . [T]hey are not directly productive. They are merely claims against real resources.”

With those two warnings in mind, that people and financial capital are not (and should not be considered) resources, consider our current economy.

Our recent economic crisis shows just how strongly our economy is based on the financial services sector, which are not true resources. And our workforce and educational emphasis can easily begin to treat people as resources. But if neither of these are truly resources, what is our economy founded on?

In short, I propose the question. Have we forgotten those two basic points of economics? And what would an economy look like that valued real resources over artificial resources and valued people over resources?

Debtism

My high school economics textbook defined capitalism in contrast to what it called "landism" and "laborism." Capitalism, according to the author, is not so much a free market or unregulated system as it is an economy driven by capital., In other words, the most powerful movers aren't those with the largest workforces or most land, but the most available money.

I have been reminded of this while reading about our current economic situation--for banks and other institutions got into trouble because they didn't have the capital necessary to pay back their debts. To maximize their capital, they borrowed more than they could sustain.

The federal government is no different, as the President's budget announcement has reminded us. For a quick review, here is the annual budget deficit calculated since 1960. It is now around $12 trillion.


Yet business and government are not the only two institutions using this model. Average Americans are also. As we can see from a second set of numbers, the federal debt is lower than--but apparently following--another trend. Consider the federal debt placed alongside household and non-profit liabilities (i.e. not business debt), which is now sitting around $14 trillion.

It would appear that, rather than electing politicians who go to Washington and start to spend, we elect those like us who merely continue the habits they practice at home.

And this doesn't even include the trillions upon trillions of business and banking liabilities currently supporting (at least in theory) this capitalistic economy. That is a whole separate post. But Aristotle postulated that there are three types of state (monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy), and each type has a good form and a bad form. Might the same be said of economic structures, where "capitalism" may be a type, but having a good and bad form? If so, is it just possible that we are moving into that bad form, something akin to debtism?