Mike Miller and I (Marc Gallagher) are attending CPAC over the next few days. This is our first update from the conference. It’s difficult making your way through throngs of people wanting to hand you literature that completely goes against the philosophy of liberty. The Campaign For Liberty row in the Exhibit Hall is an oasis.
We arrived at the hotel around 11am, checked in and headed to the C4L booth to pick up our “credentials”. We then wandered around aimlessly for a bit looking for the “XPAC Lounge” to get good seats for the live Freedom Watch show set for 12:30pm.
Why should you care? Why, for that matter, am I spending time during Thanksgiving weekend writing this and running for U.S. Congress to serve the public as an independent private citizen, when that institution is so corrupted that it would be akin to working in a disease-ridden sewer for someone like me? In the words of Ludwig von Mises in his critique Socialism in 1922:
“Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore, everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us.”
On November 14, 2009, the Mises Circle met in Newport Beach, California, and gave several lectures relevant to the current depression and how to solve it entitled “The Economic Downturn – Cause and Cure.” Below you will find the videos that will shed a lot of light on what is occurring. All of the speakers are from the Austrian school of economics, otherwise known as REALITY economics, which is completely unlike the half-witted analysis of most “respected” Keynesian economists, such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. Two of the speakers, Thomas DiLorenzo and Robert Murphy were my professors this summer at Mises University. If you like these talks, I highly recommend ordering (for free) a mailing of the Mises Institute’s Free Market newsletter. Below are a couple slides (46-47) I created highlighting key differences between Keynesian and Austrian economics. Read More »
One book near the top of my must-read list is Thomas DiLorenzo’s Hamilton’s Curse. Having previously read The Real Lincoln and listened to DiLorenzo speak in person and on talk shows like Baltimore’s Ron Smith Show, I am already a fan. Today at the Future of Freedom Foundation, George C. Leef references DiLorenzo’s book as he gives his own scathing rundown of how Hamilton and his legacy has greatly ruined this country. Here’s a small piece:
…Hamilton looks pleasant enough in his portrait on our $10 bill, but he was an arrogant egomaniac.
Hamilton was a determined opponent of Jefferson’s laissez-faire philosophy at every turn. When it came to trade, he demanded high protective tariffs because he thought, in the mercantilistic tradition, that if a nation produced “its own” goods rather than purchasing them from “other countries” it would become stronger. Mercantilism was inseparable from economic nationalism — the foolish and destructive idea that political boundaries have great economic significance. (We still suffer grievously from this idiocy, of course.) Individual American consumers would be harmed by artificially high prices for items they might have bought less expensively from producers in other countries, but Hamilton was not concerned about the problems of individuals. His obsession was with “strengthening” the nation.
In the early years of the United States, Hamilton battled against Jefferson’s reading of the Constitution as placing severe limits on federal authority. To Hamilton and his Federalist allies, the wording of the Constitution, especially the enumerated powers of Congress, meant nothing more than an intellectual game of trying to invent interpretations that gave the government “inherent” powers that it was not specifically given. Contrary to the sensible, restrictive reading of the Constitution defended by Jefferson, Hamilton insisted that the General Welfare and Commerce Clauses were meant to give the federal government almost limitless powers.
Leef then goes on to discuss the traitorous presidencies of Lincoln, Roosevelt, and disasters in the form of the 17th Amendment, the income tax, and the Federal Reserve Act. I highly recommend reading the entire article.
The irony and hypocrisy of Barack Obama being sworn in on the Lincoln Bible is not lost on Liberty Hero Walter E. Williams in his most recent column.
President Obama can be forgiven for celebrating the hypocrisy of Abraham Lincoln because the victors of wars write their history and glorify the winners. The recognition that slavery is a despicable institution does not require hero worship of a president who made the largest contribution to the unraveling of our Constitution. After all when it is settled by brute force that states cannot secede, as they thought they had the right to in 1787, then the federal government can ride roughshod over states and their people’s right — in a word make meaningless the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.
James Madison describes us as having dual sovereignty, the allocation of power between the federal government and the states, and that the original system of government set up by the Founding Fathers, while certain powers were delegated to the central government, was to protect the lives, liberties, and property of the American people.
The United States of America was founded as a group of sovereign states. In this video by LibertyPen.com, Thomas DiLorenzo explains why this concept is crucial to the preservation of individual liberty.
A new article by Liberty Hero Thomas DiLorenzo over at LRC entitled “Tales From an Academic Looney Bin” discusses the frightening reality that so-called ‘Cultural Marxists’ have infiltrated and taken over many higher-learning institutions. We’ve heard this type of thing for years, and DiLorenzo’s examples at Baltimore’s Loyola College are no exception.
…[Cultural Marxists] took over and began acting, well, like lunatics. I learned from the local media that the former academic vice president had rejected an applicant for a top job because the applicant “wasn’t black enough.” The job was academic vice president for diversity and the interviewee was an African-American man with very impressive credentials. According to news reports, this man was told that he was well qualified, but that the College preferred an African-American with somewhat darker skin.
So here was a man who had probably been discriminated against in employment during his lifetime who had reached the peak of his professional career, and was interviewing for what was probably his dream job. And he is told he wasn’t getting the job, once again, because of his skin color. And you probably thought “lunatic” was too strong a word.
This is a very entertaining article. Highly recommended. Read it here.
Next up is Austrian economist Thomas J. DiLorenzo. Born 1954, DiLorenzo teaches American Economics at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland, a senior faculty member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and author/co-author of several books, most notably:
Well known for shunning the typical politically-correct line of thinking, his well-researched and masterfully eloquent works are eye opening to many whose only knowledge of political and economic topics resulted from the revisionist history often taught in government schools.
DiLorenzo is steadfast in his claim that the interventions of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt exacerbated the economic problems of the 1930s and prolonged the Great Depression. As he wrote in the opening paragraph of The New Deal Debunked (again) (a followup to his earlier article A New, New Deal):
One of Liberty Maven’s (soon-to-be) Liberty Heroes, Thomas DiLorenzo, was interviewed by columnist Ilana Mercer. DiLorenzo, who recently wrote Hamilton’s Curse, discusses at length Hamilton’s strong desire for mercantilism in this country, and throws the stated desires of Obama and McCain into the mix for comparison purposes.
Obama is a slick politician, so I expect him to continue to administer the neo-mercantilist, Hamiltonian empire that has been built up by both parties over the decades, with all of its schemes for corporate welfare for defense contractors, investment bankers and myriad other politically active businesses which, in turn, provide financial support for the regime. But Obama is also a hardcore leftist who spent his earlier career working with some of the craziest socialists in America, groups like ACORN, who advocated such things as kicking doctors off the boards of hospitals and replacing them with “the poor,” and Soviet-style nationalization of the energy and health care industries.
Many of the early settlers of his nation had fled Great Britain to escape the tyranny and mercantilist economic system they had endured, and ultimately ended up in a bloody Revolutionary War to assert their independence. But still there were those, such as Alexander Hamilton and Robert Morris who pushed hard to adopt Great Britain’s central banking system, modeled after the Bank of England. Thomas DiLorenzo, author of Hamilton’s Curse has written an article on this subject for the Ludwig von Mises Institute:
Central banking has been a corrupt, mercantilist scheme and an engine of corporate welfare from its very beginning in the late 18th century. The first central bank, the Bank of North America, was “driven through the Continental Congress by [congressman and financier] Robert Morris in the Spring of 1781,” wrote Murray Rothbard in The Mystery of Banking (p. 191). The Philadelphia businessman Morris had been a defense contractor during the Revolutionary War who “siphoned off millions from the public treasury into contracts to his own … firm and to those of his associates.” He was also “leader of the powerful Nationalist forces” in the new country.
The main objective of the Nationalists, who were also known as Federalists, was essentially to establish an American version of the British mercantilist system, the very system that the Revolution had been fought against. Indeed, it was this system that the ancestors of the Revolutionaries had fled from when they came to America.
A hero of Liberty Maven, Thomas J. DiLorenzo wrote a fantasic article at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute discussing the detriments of central banking schemes that have put us into this economic crises.
Ask yourself this question: was the housing price bubble, which has burst, caused by (a) a Fed policy of too much liquidity, which caused artificially low interest rates, which in turn caused a great deal of malinvestment, or (b) a Fed policy of too little liquidity which caused high interest rates and a credit-starved economy? If you chose answer b, congratulations, you may have a future as a celebrated author, historian, and Wall Street Journal commentator.
Answer b is a theme of a truly ridiculous article by John Steele Gordon in the October 10 issue of the Wall Street Journal online entitled “A Short Banking History of the United States.” The article is an attempt to defend the Fed, its founding father, Alexander Hamilton, and the regime that it finances. (Gordon is the author of a book entitled Hamilton’s Blessing which sings the praises of a large public debt, something that Hamilton himself called a “public blessing.”)
Liberty Maven
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far, in Liberty Maven’s ongoing series 
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