If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.
G. K. Chesterton
Tweet of the Day
Katie Stuart, an Illinois legislator, has proposed free hunting & fishing for current & retired state employees and law enforcement. Party?— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) April 17, 2017
Isn't it good to know Dems like Stuart, in a debtor state, want to give $1M pension employees free pastimes not available to taxpayers?— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) April 17, 2017
It's sad to see so many Twitter hashtags with leftist gratuitous anti-Trump personal insults. I usually focus on policy with a dash of humor— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) April 17, 2017
Tax Day 2017
I was one of the few dropping off tax returns Saturday afternoon at the local Post Office (only to note the last pickup was over the past hour). In fact, it was the third piece of mail to the IRS last week. The worst part was trying to figure out my partial year ObamaCare penalty where I had to figure out how many hundreds of dollars to pay the government for the privilege of paying my own expenses out of pocket. The tax forms/instructions really aren't written for the convenience of that scenario.What History Has In Common
Planned Parenthood: Putting Lipstick On an Abortion Mill
DiLorenzo on Spielberg's Lincoln (Part 1?)
(Let me begin by noting I haven't watched this movie.) I don't know if there's a continuation to this video (as implied); if so, it didn't surface in the first few pages of my searches on Youtube and Google. The Spielberg movie is based on the idea that Lincoln was some master political wheeler-dealer who managed to get the anti-slavery 13th Amendment through Congress. This is largely based on the biography written by Doris Kearns Goodwin, whom DiLorenzo elsewhere contemptuously describes as a court (state) historian. (There's a really weird story of how when (married) Goodwin was writing her biography of LBJ, he would crawl into her bed at 5:30 AM to talk, how he told her she reminded him of his late mother.) Goodwin was no established Lincoln scholar (the book was reportedly her first work on Lincoln, as she had also written of other Presidents as well). He considers her a plagiarist (re: reviewers of her books on Kennedy and FDR)
DiLorenzo basically argues the a well-known black historian Lerone Bennett debunked the role of Lincoln, that a respected Lincoln scholar Donald David could only corroborate 2 Congressmen Lincoln contacted over the thirteenth amendment. He points out that Lincoln was willing to cut any number of deals (including the Corwin Amendment) which would permanently accommodate slavery in any number of states; he favored resettling blacks to other countries and continents, did not have an issue with certain racially discriminatory public policy.
I think a number of people might question why a libertarian like DiLorenzo would want to defend the South and the anti-liberty policy of slavery (he doesn't really). First, DiLorenzo points out that slavery had peacefully ended in most of the Northern states (including New York by the 1850's) without collapsing the economies. Second, DiLorenzo points out that slaveholding was largely protected by expensive-to-enforce state laws and Fugitive Slave Laws. A separate Confederacy could not expect a free North to return slaves (which would increase the risk and costs of holding slaves, lower profits and hence push slave prices lower); moreover, emerging free labor (maybe 80% of the population), necessary because of artificially high prices of slaves, found their wages lower because of competition from slave labor and would likely eventually rebel from the imposition of taxes to cover socialized costs of slavery enforcement. In fact, DiLorenzo notes that free labor in the South was starting to migrate to higher-paying Northern jobs. It would have been just a matter of time before the institution of slavery would collapse under its own weight as free labor would rise up against the slave-holding minority.
The issue has more to do with voluntary association. The idea that one's ancestors made permanent decisions binding on our own liberty is arbitrary; this ignores the consent of today's governed, including the minority South in the mid-nineteenth century. Hence. libertarians generally favor secession and/or nullification and subscribe to the non-aggression principle. The fact that we lost over 600k lives (I think DiLorenzo says in this clip, it may be 200k higher) make it an abomination; Lincoln saw the South primarily as a tariff cash cow for the Northern-leaning central government.
Education Choice and the Disabled
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Nate Beeler via Townhall |
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists
Amy Grant, "Find a Way"
