Those "Republicans In Name Only" who do not hold fiscally
conservative, "constitutional/libertarian" values and tenets, and who
have infiltrated our Party.
On Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 1:53 PM, MJ <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I haven't lost hope! Stay the course, and let's take our Party,
as well as our Nation back!!
Take it back from whom?
Regard$,
--MJ
*The Origins of the GOP
*by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
Some very silly books have been written about the history of the
Republican Party (and the Democrat Party). They tend to read like
The Story of Moses, with Christ-like figures overcoming tremendous
roadblocks to achieve greatness and sanctify not only themselves,
but the entire nation. They are usually written by political hacks
and funded rather surreptitiously by various business and other
special-interest groups that are associated with the Party. Such
books, of course, are pure baloney: "GOP" should really stand for
"*G*ang *O*f *P*lunderers."
*The Party of Plunder
*As soon as the newly-created GOP gained enough power in the late
1850s, the first thing it did was to get the U.S. House of
Representatives to pass the protectionist Morrill Tariff during
the 185960 session, before Lincoln's election and before any
southern state had seceded. The Party then vigorously defended
southern slavery. Two days before Lincoln's inauguration, after
the seven states of the lower South had seceded and taken their
fourteen senators with them, the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate
passed a constitutional amendment (that had already passed the
House) that would have forbidden the federal government from ever
interfering with southern slavery. Two days later, Lincoln would
pledge his support for this amendment in his first inaugural
address, saying he preferred that the defense of slavery in the
Constitution be made "express and irrevocable." He also promised
in that same address a federal invasion of any state that failed
to collect the newly-doubled U.S. tariff rate.
The GOP opposed the /extension /of slavery to the new territories,
not southern slavery, and it did so for the basest of reasons.
Reason number one was the desire to keep all blacks slave or
free from the territories, which the Party wanted to be an
all-white preserve. To the GOP "free soil" meant soil that was
free of black people, not freedom per se. That's why states like
Illinois, "Land of Lincoln," had previously amended their
constitutions to make it illegal for black people to move into
them. The few blacks who did reside in these areas had virtually
no citizenship rights and were grossly discriminated against in
all aspects of their lives.
The second reason for opposing the extension of slavery to the new
territories was to limit congressional representation of the
Democratic Party, which would have been increased due to the
Three-Fifths Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which allowed for
every five slaves to be counted as three persons for purposes of
determining the number of congressional representatives in each
state. Thus, pork-barrel politics and white supremacy were the
reasons the "Grand Old Party" gave for opposing the extension of
slavery in 1860.
As for politics, the purpose of the GOP's quest for political
domination was so that it could finally adopt the old mercantilist
economic agenda of the Whigs, who were mostly transformed into
Republicans when the Whig Party fell apart in the early 1850s.
Once the south seceded, and the Southern Democrats left Congress,
the GOP immediately pushed through the entire Whig economic agenda.
*Lincoln's "New Deal"
*Incapable of ever doing anything but praising the early GOP, most
contemporary historians, who are largely ignorant of economics,
praise this "achievement" to the treetops. A good example of this
appears in the October 2004 issue of /The Smithsonian/ magazine,
in an essay by Lincoln biographer David Donald entitled "1860: The
Road Not Taken." The essay is part of a "what if" symposium that
poses the question of what America would look like had the
outcomes of the presidential elections of 1860, 1912, 1932, and
1980 been different.
Donald zeroes in on the Lincoln administration's "social
legislation." Had Lincoln not been elected, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning biographer writes, a sizeable Democratic minority in
Congress
Would have blocked the important economic and social
legislation enacted by the Republicans during the Civil War.
Thus, there would likely have been no high tariff laws that
protected the iron industry, so essential in postwar economic
development, no Homestead Act giving 160 acres to settlers
willing to occupy and till land out West, no transcontinental
railroad legislation, no land-grant colleges, no national
currency or national banking system, no Department of
Agriculture to offer expert guidance on better seeds and
improved tillage. Without such legislation, the economic
takeoff that made the United States a major industrial power
by the end of the century would have been prevented . . .
Like most Lincoln scholars who comment on economic issues, Donald
is mostly ignorant of the subject he is speaking of. Protectionist
tariffs made the U.S. steel industry lazy and inefficient by
isolating it from the rigors of international competition.
Consequently, it became a perpetual whiner and complainer about
the "unfairness" of competition the spoiled brat of the American
economy. For decades, it has lobbied for protectionism that has
plundered the American consumer, made the industry even lazier and
more inefficient, allowing it to pander to its unions and their
grossly inefficient featherbedding rules, and generally made it
far less competitive that it would have been under a free trade
regime. Despite a century of "protection," the steel industry has
all but disappeared from my home state of Pennsylvania, for example.
Furthermore, the higher steel prices caused by protectionist
tariffs have always been harmful to American steel-using
industries, which includes virtually all of American
manufacturing. Thus, GOP protectionism was a serious drag on
American industrial success during the late nineteenth century,
contrary to Donald's assertions. American industry grew despite
these foolish and counterproductive policies, not because of them.
Late nineteenth-century tariff protection was especially harmful
to American agriculture. American farmers have always sold a large
portion of their output on foreign markets. Tariffs that reduce
the volume of international trade end up reducing the amount of
money that our foreign trading partners have with which to
purchase American goods, especially American agricultural output.
That's why the farmers of the Midwest were vociferous proponents
of free trade during the late nineteenth century. GOP
protectionism did far more harm to American farmers than any
conceivable good that David Donald's beloved U.S. Department of
Agriculture bureaucracy could ever have done. Not to mention the
fact that our trading partners often retaliated with protectionist
policies of their own that blocked the sale of American goods in
their countries.
As for the Homestead Act, the majority of the land given away
under the Act, as historian Ludwell Johnson has shown, went to
timber and mining companies, most assuredly in return for
political campaign contributions from those same companies. And
the giving away of the land, as opposed to selling it, was a
political impetus to keep tariff rates high and economically
destructive during this pre-income tax era when the majority of
federal revenues came from the tariff.
The government-subsidized transcontinental railroads were arguably
the worst examples in all of American history of the corruption
and inefficiency that is always associated with government "public
works" projects (See Burton Folsom, The Myth of the Robber Barons
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0963020315/lewrockwell/>).
They resulted in the Credit Mobilier scandal of the Grant
administration, and fueled the arguments of the "progressive
movement" to have government regulate and control American
business. By contrast, James J. Hill built his highly successful
transcontinental railroad, the Great Northern, without a dime of
government subsidy.
Land-grant colleges opened the door to the politicization of
higher education that plagues virtually every American college and
university today, and is the inevitable result of the
politicization of education. The Department of Agriculture was
never necessary to educate farmers about the latest seeds; the
free market can handle such tasks much more efficiently. Instead,
the Department of Agriculture has always been, first and foremost,
an enforcer of the agricultural cartel operated by federal
politicians on behalf of a very important political bloc, farmers.
It is the U.S.D.A. that paid farmers for not raising crops and
livestock during the Great Depression, when thousands were
starving or suffering from malnutrition. Its programs of paying
farmers for not farming have always been simply special-interest
politics designed to allow federal politicians to buy votes (with
taxpayers' money) from farm communities by plundering American
consumers with the higher food prices that are caused by these
policies.
The Lincoln administration's banking legislation, which Donald
also praises, was a precursor to the inflationary-spiral and
depression-generating policies of the Fed. They replaced what
economic historian Jeffrey Hummel described as the most stable
banking system in American history, the so-called free-banking
system that existed in the two decades prior to the war, and
opened the door to a tremendous centralization of governmental
power. That of course is exactly what the Republican Party,
comprised of the political descendants of the Federalists and the
Whigs, always wanted.
As economists Mark Thornton and Robert Ekelund, Jr., note in their
book, Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the
Civil War
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0842029605/lewrockwell/>
(p. 99):
The flurry of new laws, regulations, and bureaucracies created
by President Lincoln and the Republican Party is reminiscent
of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s, for the volume,
scope, and questionable constitutionality of its legislative
output. . . . [I]t should not be too surprising to learn that
the term "New Deal" was actually coined in March 1865 by a
newspaper editor in Raleigh to characterize Lincoln and the
Republicans and persuade North Carolina voters to rejoin the
Union. The massive expansion of the federal government into
the economy led [historian] Daniel Elazar to claim that "one
could easily call Lincoln's presidency the New Deal of the 1860s."
The historian Daniel Elazar who is cited by Thornton and Ekelund
put together the following table to characterize "Lincoln's New Deal":
*Lincoln's New Deal*
* Morrill Tariff (1861)
* First Income Tax (1861)
* Expanded Postal Service (1861)
* Homestead Act (1862)
* Morrill Land-Grant College Act (1862)
* Department of Agriculture (1862)
* Bureau of Printing and Engraving (1862)
* Transcontinental Railroad Grants (1862, 1863, 1864)
* National Banking Acts (1863, 1864, 1865, 1866)
* Comptroller of the Currency (1863)
* National Academy of Sciences (1863)
* "Free" Urban Mail Delivery (1863)
* Yosemite Nature Reserve Land Grant (1864)
* Contract Labor Act (1864)
* Office of Immigration (1864)
* Railway Mail Service (1864)
* Money Order System (1864)
* Source: Daniel Elazar, "Comment," in D. Gilchrest and W.
Lewis, eds. Economic Change in the Civil War Era (1965), pp.
9899.
More importantly than this legislation, the GOP orchestrated the
abolition of the voluntary union of the founding fathers and in
its place put a non-voluntary, consolidated empire, waging total
war on fellow citizens for four long years in order to succeed.
Their stated motives were never to abolish southern slavery, as
mentioned above, but they skillfully used the slaves as pawns in
their imperialistic scheme, causing the U.S. to become the only
nation on earth in the nineteenth century to associate the
violence of war with the abolition of slavery. The GOP continued
to use the ex-slaves as political pawns during "Reconstruction," a
twelve-year plundering expedition throughout the South. When the
military occupation ended in 1877, the hapless ex-slaves were then
left to fend for themselves against a vengeful population. The
Gang of Plunderers did nothing to help them, for Reconstruction
was over and they voted overwhelmingly Republican anyway.
Having declared that it possessed "a treasury of virtue" for
having "saved the union" and freed the slaves, the GOP then
enjoyed a monopoly of political power for decades. Such "virtue"
was immediately used to wage a campaign of ethnic genocide against
the Plains Indians to make way for the government-subsidized
railroads, announced General Sherman, who was the commanding
general of the campaign for many years. The South and the rest
of the country as well was plundered by protectionist tariffs
for the next fifty years by the "virtuous" GOP, primarily for the
benefit of the Party's big-business supporters.
To this day politicians -- especially Republican Politicians --
use the fake history of the origins of the GOP as the Party of
Saints during the Lincoln era to "justify" any and all manner of
interventions, from an expanded welfare state, to the
nationalization of the education system, to the current regime's
attempt at imperialistic conquest in the Middle East. But in
reality it's the same old Gang of Plunderers.
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