In a January 18 interview with Glenn Beck Rick Santorum decided to compare his view of the Constitution with that of Ron Paul. His statements can only be described as delusional and totalitarian.

Santorum first claimed to have read an eighteenth-century dictionary that defined happiness as “to do the morally right thing.” This is how the founding fathers defined happiness, he said. This is Santorum’s definition of “happiness,” not the founding fathers. It’s a good bet he is lying when claiming to have read an eighteenth-century dictionary. (But I suppose anything is possible with a man who brought his deceased infant home who died two hours after birth and slept with it after showing it to his children, as Santorum admits to have done).

The freedom to do whatever you want to do – as long as you do not harm anyone else or interfere in their equal freedom – would “lead to libertinism and lead to chaos” said Sanctimonious Santorum, who has also pledged to do what he can to put an end to contraception if elected president. Contraception changes “the way things ought to be,” he says. Santorum is self assured that he, and he alone, understands “the way things ought to be” and pledges to use the powers of the state to forcefully impose his “understanding” on the entire country.

But the founding fathers are known as champions of freedom, are they not? But what kind of freedom? According to Santorum, who apparently fancies himself as an historian, freedom in America means “the freedom to do what you ought to do – what you are properly ordered to do [by a politician like himself] – as someone living a good, decent, and ordered life” (emphasis added). “That’s the differentiation that I believe Ron Paul and I have with respect to what liberty is,” said Santorum. To Rick Santorum, “freedom” means doing what government “properly” orders you to do, as long as government is controlled by good, proper, moral people like himself, the K-Street lobbyist for the Pennsylvania coal mining industry (and anyone else who will pay his huge fees for influence peddling).

This is not the view of the American founding fathers, as Santorum claims. It is more likely to have been the mindset of the founders of the Soviet Union, not the American union. It is the mindset of the neoconservatives whose founding members were, after all, Trotskyite communists. This includes the self-described “godfather” of neoconservatism, the late Irving Kristol, who reveled in talking about his youthful Trotskyite roots.

If Santorum really wanted to know how the founding fathers defined freedom he would not make up imaginary, two-century old dictionary entries but would read what the founders actually said. A good place to start would be Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address where he stated: “[A] wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government . . .” It is hard to imagine that Jefferson, the author of the 1786 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom that strongly opposed the governmental imposition of any religious views on anyone while defending religious liberty in general, would have admired an Uber-Catholic Theocrat like Santorum. For government to compel a man to support a religious cause with which he disbelieves, wrote Jefferson, is “sinful and tyrannical.”

When Ron Paul says that such victimless crimes as prostitution or smoking pot should be decriminalized, says Santorum, “that’s not the moral foundation of our country,” once again pretending to be The Expert on the thinking of the founding fathers. There’s one problem with Santorum’s historical revisionism, however. Prostitution was in fact pervasive in Colonial America. Prostitutes traveled with George Washington’s army, serving as nurses and cooks as well as prostitutes. In fact, there were no laws in America banning prostitution until Massachusetts enacted the first one in 1917. (The 1910 “Mann Act,” named after Congressman James Mann, prohibited “white slavery” for the purpose of prostitution). Federal laws against prostitution were first enacted after women got the right to vote and immediately outlawed prostitution in the vicinity of military bases when their husbands and boyfriends were off serving in the military. In other words the founding fathers agreed with Ron Paul, not Rick Santorum, on personal liberty issues.

America is “not just a collection of freedoms,” said the insufferably sanctimonious Santorum. It is, instead, a collection of orders from the state defining what “proper” behavior is. Stalin himself could not have said it better.

January 20, 2012

Source: Lew Rockwell. Written by Thomas J. DiLorenzo.

Presented by Thomas DiLorenzo at the Mises Circle at Furman University: “The Coming Currency Crisis and the Downfall of the Dollar,” 13 November 2010.

*Written by Tho Bishop.

Paul Krugman has a Bachelors from Yale, a PhD from MIT, writes daily for the New York Times and probably has his Nobel Prize in Economics prominently displayed in his parlor (though I have yet been invited to his manor.) He is also a proud progressive and an excellent resource for those on the left looking for a prominent economist to lend intellectual credence to ridiculous notions like Obama’s 2009 Stimulus plan.

He is also prone to intellectual laziness.

For example, in an article whose premise I otherwise support, Krugman makes this comment, “You say that reintroducing what amounts to slavery is unacceptable? Well, that’s just your ideology — and a significant number of Americans probably don’t share that ideology.” Krugman is implying, if not out-right declaring, that if you at all sympathize with the South in the Civil War you support slavery. Ignore the arguments about State’s Rights; ignore such trivial details such as Lincoln’s tripling of tariffs (of which the South paid most of, while the North received the majority of the projects they funded); ignore the fact that the founding of America itself was itself an act of Southern-like secession – if you have any sympathy to the Confederate cause, you advocate reintroducing slavery.

This is not the first time that Krugman gets all limp-minded whenever the Civil War is involved. When Domestic Monetary Policy Chairman Ron Paul had economist, historian and Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute Thomas DiLorenzo testify at his first DMP hearing, Krugman dismissed it all as “Johnny Reb economics”. DiLorenzo, author of Lincoln Unmasked, is extremely critical of Abraham Lincoln’s economic policy, which offends Krugman who advocates our 16^th President’s canonization. Not happy with simply criticizing DiLorenzo, Krugman also brings up Congressman Paul Ryan for stating, “There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its people than to debase its currency.” For daring to speak out about the dangers of inflated currency, a policy advocated by Lincoln, Krugman accuses the two men of supporting a return to “the antebellum era.”

In his article February 8^th article on the Paul hearing, Krugman makes the curious choice to bring up Amity Shales, the author of The Forgotten Man, a book critical of FDR’s New Deal policies. This is curious because the two authors have no connection. As Robert Wenzel of EconomicPolicyJournal explains:

To Krugman, if you think FDR policies were failed policies (as does the Mises Institute), then you are part of the MI circle.

How’s that for a tight connection?

In truth, as far as I know, and I know the Mises group fairly well, I don’t think any of them know Shlaes personally. And, there is probably a good part of the group that don’t know her work at all. So why is Krugman making the broad swipe to link Shlaes to the dishonest Clay attack, when the linking is absolutely absurd?

Unfortunately this sort of sloppy, erroneous content has become the standard for Krugman. Instead of engaging in a healthy discussion of debate, he resorts to generalizations, straw men or simply half truths. Should anything more be expected of a guy who apparently believes that in a time with the internet you can get away with lying about your record.

My Two Cents: Man, I’d love to go to this! However I am in Florida and at that time on that day I will be at a Cato Institute event with FL Governor Rick Scott and Neal Boortz. Hopefully there is video footage. End Two Cents.

*Taken from Lew Rockwell.com.

The historic first hearing of Chairman Ron Paul’s monetary policy committee, to expose the Fed as the prime creator of unemployment and so much human suffering, will take place at: 10:00AM on Wednesday, February 9, 2011, in Room 2128 of the Rayburn House Office Building, the main hearing room of the Financial Services Committee. The witnesses include the eloquent Austro-free-market stars Thomas DiLorenzo of Loyola College and Richard Vedder of Ohio University.

The Fed itself, and at least three big banks, lobbied against Ron’s chairmanship. Republicans who share their fear of the truth worked with Paul Ryan, chairman of the “Budget” Committee, to schedule hearings with Bernanke at the exact same time as Ron’s, to try to diminish the significance of Ron’s. Ryan, btw, is the fair-haired boy of the Republican leadership who gave the boring response to Obama’s boring State of the Empire Address. Like the Republican leadership, Ryan talks about cutting spending, but that is only a ruse. Ryan is a big-government neocon, and so naturally supported TARP, Bush’s prescription drug welfare, his wars, and the empire.

I don’t believe this insider trick will work against Ron, because his support comes not from the regime or the Republican leadership, but from the grassroots. I think the Paulians will pack Ron’s hearings, and not only to show their support for him against the power elite. These hearings will have huge significance in the fight against the Fed, the fractional-reserve banksters, and other destroyers of our prosperity and freedom. It will also be a lot of fun!

My Two Cents: Lincoln was a tyrant and arguably the worst president we ever had, contrary to what you have been taught to believe. For my trilogy of mythbusting on Lincoln, click here, here and here. End Two Cents.

*Taken from the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Written by Thomas DiLorenzo.

In his 1962 book, Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson wrote that “if we would grasp the significance of the Civil War in relation to the history of our time” it is important to realize that the “impulse” for centralized governmental power was very strong in the 19th century, all around the world. Wilson wrote that it was Lincoln, Lenin, and Bismarck who were more responsible than anyone in their respective countries for introducing the plague of centralized governmental bureaucracy. Lincoln became “an uncompromising dictator,” and expanded and centralized governmental power in such a way that “all the bad potentialities of the policies he had initiated were realized … in the most undesirable ways.”

The Lincoln regime destroyed the system of federalism, or states’ rights, that was established by the founding fathers. After the war, the union was no longer voluntary, and all states, North and South, became mere appendages of Washington, DC. Lincoln illegally suspended the writ of habeas corpus and imprisoned tens of thousands of political dissenters without due process; waged total war with the bombing, plundering, and mass murder of some 50,000 of his own citizens; signed ten tariff-raising bills; imposed heavy “sin taxes” on alcohol and tobacco; introduced the first federal income-tax and military-conscription laws; introduced an internal-revenue bureaucracy for the first time; executed thousands of accused deserters from the army; shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers in the Northern states; went off the gold standard and nationalized the money supply; introduced massive corporate-welfare schemes; deported an opposition member of Congress; and exploded the public debt, among other sins. By “targeting and butchering [Southern] civilians,” Murray Rothbard wrote in his essay, “America’s Two Just Wars: 1775 and 1861″ (in John Denson, ed., The Costs of War), “Lincoln and Grant and Sherman paved the way for all the genocidal horrors of the monstrous 20th century.” They “opened the Pandora’s Box of genocide and the extermination of civilians …”

Commenting on the evils of such centralized governmental power in his book, Omnipotent Government, Ludwig von Mises wrote that, as new powers accrued to governments during the 19th and early 20th centuries, the powers

accrued not to the member states but to the federal government. Every step toward more government interference and toward more planning means at the same time an expansion of the jurisdiction of the central government …. It is a very significant fact that the adversaries of the trend toward more government control describe their opposition as a fight against Washington and against Berne, i.e., against centralization. It is conceived as a contest of states’ rights versus the central power. (p. 268)

All of this must be forgotten, Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Robert Penn Warren wrote in his 1961 book, The Legacy of the Civil War. It must be forgotten so that the federal government can perpetuate the lie that it possessed a “treasury of virtue” at the end of the Civil War. All of this virtue supposedly exists to this day, even if it is expressed as “American exceptionalism.” With all this “virtue,” anything the American state does, no matter how heinous, is said to be virtuous, by definition.

It also “must be forgotten,” Warren wrote, that “the Republican platform of 1860 pledged protection to the institution of slavery … and the Republicans were ready, in 1861, to guarantee slavery in the South.” It must be forgotten that “in July, 1861, both houses of Congress, by an almost unanimous vote, affirmed that the war was waged not to interfere with the institutions of any state [i.e., slavery] but only to maintain the Union.” It must be forgotten, also, that the Emancipation Proclamation was “limited and provisional” in that “slavery was to be abolished only in the seceded states [where the government had no power to free anyone] and only if they did not return to the Union.”

It must also be forgotten, I would add, that Great Britain, Spain, France, Denmark, Sweden, the Dutch, and every other country where slavery existed in the 19th century ended slavery peacefully (as the New England states had also done).

We must also forget that most Northern states like New York, where slavery had existed for more than 200 years, “refused to adopt Negro suffrage,” Warren wrote, and that Lincoln was as much a white supremacist as any man of his time, announcing in his 1858 Charlestown, Illinois, debate with Stephen Douglas, “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”

The effect of all this forgetfulness about history is that “the man of righteousness tends to be so sure of his own motives that he does not need to inspect consequences” (emphasis added). A further effect of “the conviction of virtue is to make us lie automatically … and then in trying to justify the lie into a kind of superior truth.”

This last sentence is a perfect description of modern “Lincoln scholarship” in America. It is mostly a bundle of lies, half-truths, and excuse making, the purpose of which is to portray lies as truth and immoral acts as moral ones. That sentence is also the motivation for my new online Mises Academy course, beginning in January: The Great Centralizer: Lincoln and the Growth of Statism.

The Lincoln myth is the cornerstone of the ideology of American statism. Lincoln was the most-hated president of all time during his own lifetime, as Larry Tagg documents in his book, The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln: The Story of America’s Most Reviled President. The fact that he is now the most revered of all American presidents is a result of the work of generations of court historians and statist apologists who have literally rewritten American history in the same manner that the Soviets rewrote Russian history to consolidate their political power. The deification of Abe Lincoln eventually led to the deification of all presidents, and to the American state in general, as Professor Clyde Wilson has written, effectively resurrecting a version of the medieval notion of the divine right of kings. The divine right of kings is now called “American exceptionalism.”

The purpose of the course will be to apply the tools of Austrian economics, Austrian political economy, and libertarianism to demystify the Great Centralizer and to seek to learn the truth about the real nature of the American state and its economic interventions. We will not twist and “reinterpret” Lincoln’s own speeches to make him, and the state he presided over, look saintly, as is done by all “Lincoln scholars.” (The typical method of Lincoln “scholarship” is called “hagiography,” which is a religious term that was originally meant to describe studies of the lives of the saints).

Among the topics to be discussed in this six-week online course are Lincoln’s real views on race, including his lifelong infatuation with “colonization” or the deportation of all black people from America; his long history as a forceful proponent of Hamiltonian mercantilism in economic policy; the myth of secession as treason and of the union as “perpetual” and “divine”; the abolition of civil liberties in the North during the war; the introduction of total war, including the mass murder of some 50,000 Southern civilians; the economic consequences of the war, including the adoption of the entire Whig/Hamiltonian agenda of protectionism, nationalized banking, corporate welfare, large public debt, and an internal-revenue bureaucracy; and the politics of the Lincoln cult. Students will be asked to read only one publication, my book The Real Lincoln, along with several online articles that will be assigned each week.