[VAcourier] A Fitting Tribute to a Corrupt Tyrant

Tue Sep 11 16:48:57 EDT 2007

A Fitting Tribute to a Corrupt Tyrant

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo <mailto:TDilo at aol.com> 
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo 
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The August 25 Washington Times reported that an outfit called the " United
States Historical Society," which had donated a statue of Abe Lincoln to the
city of Richmond, Virginia in 2003, was stripped of its tax-exempt status by
the IRS. It seems that the main activity of the Society was marketing $875
miniature replicas of the statue and pocketing the profits. 
The reason the Society lost its tax exemption is that the erection of a
Lincoln statue in Richmond was considered by many Richmonders to be akin to
putting up a statue of Hitler in Tel Aviv or of Stalin in the Ukraine.
Several affluent and influential Richmonders made it a point to bring to the
attention of the IRS the real activities of the U.S. Historical Society.
They waged a four-year campaign against the organization and its
spit-in-your-face gesture of placing the Lincoln statue in their home town,
and they won.
The statue remains, of course, and is managed by the National Park Service,
which partnered with the United States Historical Society. The statue is a
fitting tribute to Dishonest Abe, now that the sponsors of the statue have
been revealed to be, let us say, less than honest and straightforward. After
all, enriching oneself and one's friends while hiding behind a smokescreen
of "humanitarian" propaganda is a major part of the Lincoln legacy. (The
U.S. Historical Society claimed that the statue would "promote healing" in
Richmond!)
Lincoln himself was a corrupt corporate insider and a lifelong mercantilist.
The economic policies that he spent his entire adult life championing -
protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare for railroad and road-building
corporations, and inflationary central banking - were nothing but an
Americanized version of the corrupt British mercantilist system that the
American Revolution was fought to discard. They were all designed to use the
powers of the state to benefit a small, politically powerful cabal of
(mostly Northern) manufacturers, bankers, and politicians at the expense of
the rest of society. They were also designed to enlarge the state by tying
all of these powerful interests to it politically. They were all finally
adopted, after some seventy years of political debate over them, during the
Lincoln regime.
Lincoln was personally corrupt as well. In Lincoln
<http://www.amazon.com/Lincoln-Railroads-Biographical-John-Starr/dp/14325639
20/lewrockwell/> and the Railroads John W. Starr recounts how Lincoln
presented the Illinois Central with a $5,000 bill in the 1850s for a single
tax case, an incredible sum at the time. The vice president of the Illinois
Central was one George B. McClellan, who would become Lincoln's commanding
general early in the war. McClellan refused to pay, so Lincoln sued his own
client. When he came to court the Illinois Central's attorneys failed to
appear and he won the judgment by default. Starr strongly suggests that it
was a corrupt scheme concocted by McClellan and Lincoln since the Illinois
Central, under McClellan's direction, continued to employ him. 
Dishonest Abe invested in land in Council Bluffs, Iowa, of all places, in
1857. To this day this piece of land is known as "Lincoln's Hill." When he
became president one of his first official acts was to call a special
session of Congress to begin work on the Pacific Railway Act that would
shower railroad corporations with government subsidies while they built a
transcontinental railroad line. When Congress finally passed the bill in
1862 it gave the president the right to decide the eastern terminus of the
line. And guess what? Dishonest Abe chose Council Bluffs, Iowa. What a
coincidence, and what a good example of political insider trading.

<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/030733841X/sr=1-1/qid=1153695320/ref=pd_bb
s_1/104-8208774-0223107?ie=UTF8&s=books/lewrockwell/> All the big Republican
Party gasbags of Lincoln's time had their fingers in the governmental pie of
railroad subsidies. The hate-filled and odious Thaddeus Stevens "received a
block of [Union Pacific] stock in exchange for his vote on the railroad
bill, writes Dee Brown in his classic history of the transcontinental
railroads, Hear
<http://www.amazon.com/Hear-That-Lonesome-Whistle-Blow/dp/0805068929/lewrock
well/> That Lonesome Whistle Blow. Republican congressman Oakes Ames guided
the bill through congress in return for contracts to supply all the shovels
for digging railroad beds from Iowa to California. William Tecumseh Sherman
was sold land near the railroad line at below-market prices. The massive
government subsidies, wrote Dee Brown, "assured the fortunes of a dynasty of
American families . . ." They also led to one of the biggest scandals in
American political history just a few years later - the Credit Mobilier
scandal during the Grant administration. It was all an inevitable
consequence of the triumph of Lincolnian mercantilism. 
  <http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/tom3.jpg> If you ever travel to
Richmond and catch a glimpse of this particular piece of government
propaganda, think of it as a fitting tribute to a corrupt and brutal tyrant
who micromanaged the murder of hundreds of innocent civilians in and around
the very city that now is forced to honor him with a life-size bronze
statue. All to "promote healing," of course. 
September 11, 2007
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail <mailto:TDilo at aol.com> ] professor of
economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real
<http://www.mises.org/store/Real-Lincoln-The-P172C0.aspx?AFID=1> Lincoln: A
New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, (Three
Rivers Press/Random House). His latest book is Lincoln
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/030733841X/sr=1-1/qid=1153695320/ref=pd_bb
s_1/104-8208774-0223107?ie=UTF8&s=books/lewrockwell/> Unmasked: What You're
Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe (Crown Forum/Random House).

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary
act."

George Orwell

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