Lincoln Worship and Slavery in the South
I've had a series of comments on the topic of the Civil War. Why is it? Are the "progressive" trolls right? Am I an Alt-Right white supremacist, a Russian bot, a Southern sympathizer, etc.? No. These people don't know anything about me; they are simply engaging in uncivil behavior because I published something they disagree with. (Am I one to talk? Don't I sometimes name-call, use some light profanity, etc.? Yes, although I'm usually dealing with nasty, vacuous, partisan, judgmental, predictable soundbites; if I were to exchange a tweet with a Paul Krugman, it would be more like "Dude!You know better than to say that! You're ruining your hard-earned reputation engaging in partisan nonsense!" or "Hypocrite! Before you become a columnist, you wrote the exact opposite!" But I don't really go onto Twitter with the intent of attacking people. I really am okay with other people having different opinions. But if you're stupid enough to say something insane like, "If you're aren't for government healthcare, you simply want people to hurry up and die", I'm going to treat you with the contempt you deserve. I think the government retards innovation in the healthcare sector, discourages private sector charitable efforts, and has cost-exacerbating policies/regulations. Consumers have to pay for benefits they don't want or need. I don't have an issue with voluntary charitable distributions, but government policy makes healthcare much more unaffordable, and then the Statists want to use the failures they cause to justify nationalization of the same industry.I grew up in a lower-middle class military family, in an integrated military. My best friend in fifth grade (while my Dad was stationed in Europe), was black. I attended high school in a south Texan border town and undergraduate school located in a southwest San Antonio barrio. As a UH doctoral student, I shared an office with a male Baptist, a Taiwanese immigrant lady, and a student from China. I've had black, Latino and female managers. My best friends include a Jew and a Hindu, neither of whom share my pro-life beliefs. I've dated black and Latina women. I've had a Native American client. I have grandnephews and grandnieces who are racially or ethnically mixed. I've worked with people from different nations, including Brazil, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Germany. During my one year on UTEP faculty, a Mexican student invited me to his family's graduation celebration. (Not to mention reportedly two great-grandparents (different tribes, genders, mixed marriages) on my Dad's side were Native American, making us far more Native American than notorious Elizabeth Warren. Of course, I'm one of roughly 2 million French-Canadian Americans, about 0.6% of the population.) The Ku Klux Klan was not happy with French-Canadian immigrants (do a Google search on the KKK and (predominantly Roman Catholic) French Canadians, particularly Maine, sometimes referred to as "white niggers"). I'm not saying this "proves" anything, but I've been intellectually curious about other cultures. When I worked in Brazil for a few months in 1995, I had a number of conversations with the natives. Even when I first went to Taste of Chicago in 1993, the first thing I bought was an African dish of goat meat with bananas. I have always been strongly pro-immigrant. Skin color has never been any more relevant than the color of one's eyes or hair, an incidental personal characteristic.
I don't really let other people define me with their stereotypes which really are ludicrously applied to libertarian-conservatives like me. For example, I think when I recently attacked failed public schools, I was referred to as a white-supremacist by some (black?) progressive, arguing that private schools were merely a mechanism for racists to escape having to send their kids to integrated schools. In fact, what most people don't realize is that public schools emerged in the nineteenth century, that it wasn't initially secular but had a strong majority Protestant context (which was a strong motive for the development of a Catholic school alternative). I attended mostly public school but attended parts or full school years from second though sixth grades in Catholic schools. Catholic schools were not that different from public school; we might attended Mass before classes and/or led off class with an introductory prayer; we may have had higher discipline (I once got my mouth washed out with soap by a nun/sister for talking back to some higher-grade student, probably a student monitor) and worn a school uniform, but the idea that we were taught dogma vs real science is utter bull crap. My Protestant classmates may have been excused from things like daily mass, and I distinctly remember my third-grade teacher was Protestant. I think a lot of it really dealt with moral development. To give an example, when I was in sixth grade (before moving to SC), we had a project to help support a struggling black family. We had a list from a family wish list, with everything from clothing items to the father's favorite brand of cigarettes (where is where I drew the line). Catholic schools always try to find a way of admitting students, even those who couldn't afford tuition (sometimes anonymous donors from church would fund the difference)--and Catholic schools have generally operated at a far lower per-student cost.
So when you get some pro-State education troll talking about private schools being some workaround to integration policy, it's a vacuous, presumptuous talking point and pure propaganda. It was not a public college which forced me to attend a lecture from a then unknown black author named Alex Haley. The Catholic Church strongly opposed anti-miscegenation laws. There were private schools long before public ones and the Brown decision by SCOTUS. There are a number of reasons parents are willing to pay for a private vs. "free" public education, e.g., higher quality teaching, more teacher/student time, an alternative to sexually or drug permissive schools, more discipline. The idea you don't want to deal with 13% of the population as co-workers or customers or fellow citizens? I don't doubt there might be a few, but the 60's are in the distant past, and the change is irreversible. We've had a black President and legislators, high-achieving black entertainers, athletes, educators and businessman. If there is an issue, it might be a perceived violation of equal protection favoring members of certain identity groups.
So, going back to Lincoln and the Civil War, why have I been so focused on the culture war issues of the Confederate flag, the Confederate statues, etc.? Part of it is due to my visiting Ft. Sumter while on a family vacation during junior high. But mostly, my opinions have changed over the past decade--and it has nothing to do with my opinion regarding the abominable institution of slavery. It had more to do with why this issue was resolved everywhere else without a divisive civil war, that the war was not the result of Southern aggression to conquer the North, that the rationale for the war was NOT slavery as claimed, and that Lincoln, far from being the American sainted President, did not respect individual liberties. I also learned that Northern abolitionists had themselves proposed secession and some, including the proto-libertarian Lysander Spooner, vigorously opposed the use of force to prevent secession. The scorched earth policy of Sherman and others against Southern civilians and a heavy-handed post-war occupation had a lot to do with the following century of resentful majoritarian abuses against the black minority. Not to mention that the Union states were hardly egalitarians; many of them opposed competing against black migrants to the Northern states, and there were discussions of returning blacks to African colonies, not of accepting them as fellow Americans.
Some have argued that an independent Confederacy would have maintained the institution of slavery, even to the present day. Let's point out whatever economic benefits to slave owners were not unique to the South--there were costs, including costs of compliance. Yet the Northern states had largely already abolished the institution (as had England, decades earlier). The Confederacy couldn't win diplomatic recognition of anti-slavery England and France, big customers of pre-war Southern-produced cotton. With other global suppliers filling the wartime gap, could free labor cotton have won favor in the same way as we might think of "fair trade" coffee or organic produce today (including New England's own thriving textile mills)?
The fact is that without Southern legislators to impede it, the smaller Union should have easily passed and ratified an anti-slavery amendment and repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law (not to mention levy a heavy tariff on slave labor cotton). Slave owners, facing a hostile Union unwilling to return escaped slaves, would have found the costs of maintaining a slave had radically increased--meaning the market price for slaves would have dropped dramatically as you factor in the risk of owning slaves. Not to mention popular anger among the majority of non-slave holding Southerners, finding themselves having to subsidize the institution of slavery--an institution which competed directly against them, driving down wages. Keep in mind that the slave owner assumed the expenses of his slaves--food, clothing, shelter, training, etc., not to mention the flight risk described above. One could argue that the overhead of managing slaves vs. free labor was a distraction from the production of cotton. (And we know Southern cotton production quickly rebounded over the decade after the war with free labor.) In fact, Watkins makes a convincing case is that the emergence of a free state in Brazil led to the institution collapsing there just 20 years later. Lincoln's invasion of the South directly led to 4 border states joining the Confederacy, exacerbating the secession.
Let's be clear: as DiLorenzo points out, Lincoln had largely won the nomination and the presidency on his pro-protectionist policy; the Congress had just passed into law the Morrill tariff basically tripled tariffs (some 3 decades after the Tariff of Abominations threatened an earlier split), by some accounts up to 80% of tariffs were collected in the South and largely spent in the North; Lincoln admitted that he feared that the Confederacy would arbitrage tariff differences across the shared border with the North, he sought to sweeten the pot for the Confederate states to stay by swearing he had no interest in interfering with the existence of slavery as it existed and would guarantee it with the Corwin Amendment, but what he would not abide (unlike the case of Texas' secession from Mexico, which he did support) is the loss of his Southern tariff cash cow for which he was willing to use force:
In doing this there needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority. The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.In fact, the Confederacy was trying to buy out Ft. Sumter and/or other Northern military posts on its soil. The Confederacy had no Navy, a fraction of the population and resources of the North; it saw Northern posts on its soil as an existential threat. Lincoln had no intention of negotiating with the "insurrectionists" or "revolutionaries". He manipulated the Confederacy into firing the first shots, which he would then use as the pretext for a Southern invasion, but make no mistake: he made it clear in his inaugural address he would not allow secession under any circumstances on his watch.
Now no standard American history book will concede any of these things, but facts are stubborn things.
Is There A Difference Between the Dems and GOP?
I often resist the LP line that the difference between the parties is merely cosmetic, that they are both committed Statists. There was also I considered Newt Gingrich as a spokesman for an updated 21st century agenda. On my hard drives, I still have a history of relevant podcasts from years back.I just had a moment of "what the hell was I thinking back then?". I was listening to a recent Fox News Sunday with a Newt Gingrich interview that had me wondering "what the hell?" I'm not sure if this was sparked by Facebook's mea culpa over purported Russian ad buying influencing Facebook's user base. Let me say if Russian operatives sought to influence me to vote Trump, they utterly failed. I know a number of Trump voters and not one claimed their vote was shaped by something they saw or read on Facebook.
But Gingrich went off on this anti-monopoly rant on Big Tech, arguing a Wild West that was desperately in need of government regulation. Say what? OH, HELL NO! America's crown jewel high tech industry has largely advanced precisely of an open market. I don't know why McCain and Gingrich seem to be pining for the days of trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt, but I suggest reading recent biographies by Andrew Napolitano and Jim Powell. Roosevelt, if nothing else, was responsible for the disastrous Presidency of Woodrow Wilson, one of the worst Presidents ever.
Be Careful In This Pricey Stock Market
This is not a financial news blog, any past results are not indicative of future returns, and invest at your own risk. I've made lots of mistakes over my investment career and I've underinvested during much of the Obama years. In part, I've been reluctant to fully invest in a Bush/Obama era of low growth and massive Fed Reserve intervention. On most economic liberty scales the US dropped from the Top 10 or so to the Top 20 under Obama. We are at a level of debt where economists tell us we take a heavy hit on growth. Nearly $100T in unfunded senior liabilities represents almost 25 years of federal revenue by themselves, never mind the $20T national debt (let's say another 5). And we aren't even talking about escalating costs of Medicaid and ObamaCare. We have a bloated budget with almost no politician willing to make tough decisions to cut spending. Long overdue tax reform is held hostage by Democrats who don't have a problem with the debt doubling under Obama but thinking tax reform benefiting the people who actually pay taxes is "unfair".Bears will be correct on average 1 year out of 3. But people have notoriously lost or left a lot of money on the table trying to time the market. There have been 3 occasions since 2000 where I managed by sell before a significant market drop, most recently when I held and liquidated a significant position (from the perspective of my limited resources) in energy before the ongoing multi-year energy correction. It wasn't "inside information"; it was more of a feeling of a risk/reward mismatch. (If I did know, I would have purchased inverse-energy ETFs.)
There are several things that make me cautious in the current market: the long bull market since 2009, increasing participation of retail investors who are almost always late to the party, the fact that much of the index gains have involved primarily the FANG (Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google) stocks, the market is fairly richly valued at this point. This is not to say it can't continue at the current pace for several more weeks or months. What bothers me there are so many things that could shake things up, including any Trump actions overseas or a collapse of tax reform. Or maybe bond prices take a hit, say, on unexpected interest rate spikes. I'm not sure we can mitigate that with international diversification; it's likely if the US market coughs, global markets catch the flu. For instance, US Treasury interest spikes would likely cause emerging market interest rates to hike into recession territory.
I've had a reasonable return to date this year (not as good at the S&P, but I've invested more conservatively). On the other hand, there's a strong correlation between Big Tech in the S&P and in information sector funds, and I definitely want to limit my exposure to FANG stocks, as much as I believe in their stories. There are a few things I'm looking for potential next moves (I'm carefully reviewing certain bond funds, out-of-favor plays, and commodities), but I'm being very conservative with my retirement money--I have no pension to fall back on.
