Letter to Chuck Schumer Re Death Tax

PO Box 130
West Shokan, New York 12494
August 4, 2008

The Honorable Charles E. Schumer
313 Hart Senate Building
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senator Schumer:

I oppose the inheritance or death tax and urge you to vote to repeal it. There are many New Yorkers, to include the Ochs Sulzbergers, the Rockefellers and the Goulds, who are wealthy but have never paid any inheritance tax because they put their money in trusts. Congress has never seen fit to tax trusts, leaving the big fish to eat the remains of small.

There is one estate tax I do favor: an estate tax on trusts that hold family-owned newspapers. Your patrons at the New York Times ought to practice what they preach, and I am sure that you will see to it that they never will.


Sincerely,


Mitchell Langbert

Ochs Sulzbergers and the Estate Tax

The New York Times has been in the same family's hands since 1896. Adolph Ochs purchased the New York Times and, since then, the Ochs Sulzbergers have retained control of the family business through inheritance via a family trust. The Ochs Sulzbergers are the wealthiest of the wealthy, among the top one thousandth of one per cent in terms of assets, yet the inheritance or death tax has not affected them, nor do they seem to think it should. Recently, shareholders of the Times complained, alleging mismanagement on the part of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Adolph Ochs's great grandson, but the Ochs Sulzberger family asserted privilege of ownership. I wonder if Arthur Ochs Sulzberger would lead the most powerful newspaper in the country if he did not inherit this position via a family trust.

Despite the fact that the Ochs Sulzbergers have inherited their assets, live off an inheritance, and the current generation has done little of importance other than be born to the right great-grandfather, the Ochs Sulzbergers preach an inheritance or death tax for others, but not for themselves.

On June 21, 2005 in a baldly hypocritical editorial, the Times wrote:

"This is not about saving mom-and-pop shops or the family farm, as President Bush and his allies would have you believe. Repealing the estate tax would cut taxes for the top 2 percent of Americans at an estimated cost of $745 billion during the first 10 years of repeal. That is more than the United States is projected to budget for homeland security. Many supporters of a repeal say the cost would be $290 billion over the next 10 years. But that lower estimate includes five years in which the estate tax is still on the books. Properly done, estate tax reform would be welcome."

In other words, if you're a family of sharpies like the Ochs Sulzbergers then you get to inherit and drive a billion dollar family fortune you did not earn into the ground, but if you're a small businessman who doesn't think in terms of legal niceties and trusts, inheritance is a selfish and reactionary proposition, a matter of budget balancing for the elite to ponder. After all, the inheritance tax is targeted at grimy small businessmen, not virtuous aritocrats like the Ochs Sulzbergers who utilize trusts to avoid the taxes that they wish to impose on others.

Although I oppose the inheritance tax, I do favor a special inheritance tax for families who own newspapers in trusts. Let the Ochs Sulzbergers practice what they preach, frauds that they and the New York Times be.

Letter to Governor Rod R. Blagojevich (D-IL) Re Obama Birth Certificate

PO Box 130
West Shokan, New York 12494
August 4, 2008

The Honorable Rod R. Blagojevich
Office of the Governor
207 State House
Springfield, IL 62706

Dear Governor Blagojevich:

This is an inquiry as to why Dan White’s Board of Elections has failed to investigate the eligibility of Senator Barack Obama to hold the office of Senator for the State of Illinois. Under the Constitution, a Senator must be a US citizen for nine years prior to becoming Senator. Proof of citizenship is an authentic birth certificate. But in recent weeks Mr. Obama’s supporters have posted a fraudulent birth certificate on a Web site, and Mr. Obama has failed to respond to my and others’ requests for a copy of his birth certificate. The issue of whether Mr. Obama was actually born in the State of Hawaii is heightened by his birth’s having been recorded in two unrelated hospitals, both in Honolulu, and by persistent questions about his mother’s whereabouts at the time of birth. Because of its culture of secrecy, the State of Hawaii has refused to make the presidential candidate’s birth information public.

Some observers have suggested that, like Hawaii, Illinois’s famously corrupt and secretive political culture ensures that Mr. White will fail to do his job and investigate the propriety of Mr. Obama’s holding the office of Senator. I urge you to oversee a thorough and open investigation of Mr. Obama’s place of birth.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

Cc: Dan White, Executive Director
Illinois Board of Elections
1020 S. Spring St.
Springfield, Illinois 62704

Letter to Governor Linda Lingle (R-HI) Re Obama Birth Certificate

PO Box 130
West Shokan, New York 12494
August 4, 2008

The Honorable Linda Lingle
Capitol, Room 415
Honolulu, Hawai`i 96813

Dear Governor Lingle:

This is a public follow up to my earlier letter to Chiyome L. Fukino, MD, Hawaii’s Director of Public Health. Dr. Fukino has not responded to my earlier letter. I am now inquiring with you as to why the State of Hawaii has been violating its Open Records Law and § 338-18 of the Hawaii Revised Statutes by refusing to make public the birth records of a major party presidential candidate in which all Americans have a direct and tangible interest.

Might it be time to allow sunlight in to disinfect Hawaii’s secretive Public Health Department?

Sincerely,


Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

Cc: Dr. Chiyome L. Fukino, MD
Director of Public Health
State of Hawaii Department of Health
Honolulu, Hawaii 98601-3378

It's the Jewish Lobby's Fault

By CHARLES HUTZLER, Associated Press Writer
19 minutes ago

BEIJING - In an audacious and deadly attack just days ahead of the Beijing Olympics, two men from a mainly Muslim ethnic group rammed a truck and hurled explosives at jogging policemen in China's restive far west Monday, killing 16.

The attack in a city near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border brought an immediate response from China's Olympic organizers, who pronounced security precautions ready to ensure safety in Beijing and other Olympic venues when the games open Friday.

Yet the timing so close to opening day heightened the attack's shock value and bore the hallmarks of local Muslim militants, said Li Wei, a counterterrorism expert affiliated with the government.

TexasDarlin on Obama Birth Certificate--Previous Owner Was Female

TexasDarlin has several fascinating posts on the Obama birth certficate, h/t Contrairimairi, Larwyn and Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs, indicating that the owner of the fraudulent Obama birth certificate presented on the Daily Kos site was female (and presumably could not have been Obama, but who knows?).

TD notes that two different Honolulu hospitals have records of Obama's birth.

On July 8 TexasDarlin asked:

"In which hospital was Obama born: Queens Medical Center or Kapiolani Medical Center? I read that Obama himself refuses to answer this question. Is that true?

Likewise the State of Hawaii continues to develop an image as a state that excels in secrecy in government. TD notes:

Recent calls to both hospitals to get confirmation of Obama’s birth led nowhere. A colleague reports:

“At Queens, I was told it was private information and I had to fill out a medical request form (needs to be signed by BO). I then said ‘Oh I thought it would be common knowledge in Hawaii which hospital he was born at.’ She then laughed nervously and said “Ah no” and told me again that I needed the form."

Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs has an analysis and report here, here and here.

Open Letter to Mr. George Soros and Open Society Institute Re Obama Birth Certificate

Mr. George Soros
Open Society Institute
400 West 59th Street
New York, NY 10019, U.S.A.

Dear Mr. Soros:

You have made a point of claiming that you believe in an "open society" and you have assertively backed Barack Obama's candidacy. At present, the State of Hawaii has violated the requirements of its Open Records Law and § 338-18 of its statute concerning birth records by refusing to provide Barack Obama’s birth certificate to every American. Yet, every American has a direct and tangible interest in seeing this information first hand. I have written to Mr. Obama and asked that he open this information to society and he has not responded. Instead, Obama supporters have offered a fraudulent birth certificate via a Web site. I am curious as to how Mr. Obama's willingness to engage in manipulative secrecy jibes with your belief in an open society. Do you continue to support Mr. Obama's candidacy despite his indifference to an open society?

Some have argued that Mr. Obama's birth certificate is not problematic and that he is merely manipulating public opinion, intending to reveal favorable information at an opportune time. If so, is this sort of political manipulation the foundation of your interpretation of what the term "open society" ought to mean?

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert

Jim and Mairi Fear an Illinois Democratic Cover Up Re Obama Birth Certificate

Given the anti-democratic and closed nature of Illinois politics Jim is skeptical of Mairi's petition drive. But stranger things have been successful. Barack Obama should hang his head in shame at his overt contempt for democracy.

Jim writes:

> I have exchanged emails with Mairia already. She is trying to collect signatures. God bless her for doing that.

> I have tried calling the RNC, but no one is picking up. You may not be familiar with Illinois, but the politics here are all run by the Chicago machine and the state combine. It is difficult to explain to an outsider how tightly controlled and inbred politics here really are. I am, at best, skeptical that a petition will produce results.

> I have called my state rep who is a democrat, but a decent guy. I will call Durbin just for yuks.

> I am open to other ideas to move this along.


>ContrairiMairi Writes:

>I am writing to request permission to circulate petitions at local Dominick's Grocery Store entrances. I am enclosing a copy of the petition being circulated. Please be certain that this petition is open to all adult residents of Illinois. It is not partisan, nor does it exclude people who are not registered voters.

>The petition requests that the State of Illinois verify that Barack Obama meets all legal requirements to hold the office of Senator of Illinois. This petition is a public service open to adults in our State. Illinois law mandates American citizenship in order to serve. Barack Obama has produced a certificate at his campaign website which is not valid. The certificate states clearly that any alteration of it renders it invalid. The certificate number has been removed, an alteration of the document, thereby rendering it invalid.

>The citizens of Illinois, by law, may request information to verify compliance with State Election guidelines and laws, and that is the sole motivation behind this petition drive.

>I am hoping you will grant us permission to circulate our petitions at your entrances. We shop frequently at Dominick's, and I feel that shoppers at your stores reflect an Illinois public that matches exactly what we hope to represent with our petition. We are striving to capture the feelings of residents who adequately reflect the total population of our great State. I feel that your shoppers meet and exceed our hope!

Sincerely,

The Progressives' Sleight of Hand

In the nineteenth century, "progress" meant technological and economic progress. Whig economists like Henry Carey believed in progress and were optimistic as opposed to the pessimism of Malthus and the Manchester school. However, by "progress" Carey meant technological and economic progress. He did not see politics as important. The idea that progress ought to occur through the political system was introduced in the late nineteenth century in several ways. First, the Mugwumps argued that rationalization of public administration through Civil Service laws meant progress. Populists argued that large scale industry must be broken up by government edict. Americans such as Henry Carter Adams, Richard T. Ely and John R. Commons, educated in Germany began to argue for social democratic intervention. Thus, the Progressives identified progress with governmental reform. Which is more important: breakthrough technologies and better management methods that increase wealth, or government policies that rationalize government operations and redistribute wealth? The Progressives seem to not have realized that there was a trade off. In particular, the policies that implement redistribution and regulation forestall entrepreneurship because their costs rest most heavily on small business entrepreneurs. The result is that the Progressives adopted an anti-progressive attitude toward technological and market progress, which was carried forward through the New Deal. The twentieth century saw a slowing of technological progress because of monetary, regulatory and redistributive reforms of the Progressive and New Deal era.

Suspicions About Obama Birth Certificate Grow

Thelma from Florida has written the following snail mail letter to my West Shokan PO Box. Her suggestion is that some good Republican in Hawaii go to all the hospitals in Honolulu to see if Obama's birth certificate can be found, and also to investigate Kenyan records. An interesting idea. Anyone up for a Hawaiian vacation in August? Or a trip to Kenya?

>Dear Sir:

I enjoyed reading your blog about your attempts to obtain Barack Hussein Obama's birth certificate.

Since Obama has dual citizenship, might it be possible to obtain information about his place of birth from Kenya records?

And Stanley Ann Dunham was on Mercer Island visiting friends with an approximately month old Obama in August 1961. The friend states that Dunham was on her way from Hawaii to visit Barack, Sr. at Harvard. But Barack Sr. didn't go to Harvard until 1963 (or late '62?) Is it possible to check records in Vancouver, Canada to determine if Dunham might have hidden out with friends in Canada while pregnant and had the child there?

At least one hospital in Honolulu that Wikipedia claims Obama was born in can find no record of his birth. Could records be checked in all hospitals in Honolulu?

I appreciate your efforts in attempting to obtain the birth certificate

Sincerely,

Thelma

E-Mail From Reader: No Response from Hawaii Health Department

>Good afternoon.

I have been following the small drama surrounding Mr. Obama’s birth certificate.

The whole affair is odd. As a parent, I have to supply our schools with official, notarized, and authentic birth certificates for each of my children to attend school. So I write, pay my fee, and a few weeks later… viola! No big deal for me, so why such a fuss and all the foot dragging on Mr. Obama’s part?

Have you received any response yet from Hawaii? It has been a month.

--Jim

Dear Jim: The Hawaii Health Department has an odd interpretation of social responsibility. On the one hand, it views the records of a major party presidential candidate as confidential despite a Hawaii open records policy. On the other, when I contacted them, Director Chiyome L. Fukino's and Communications Officer Janice Okubo's response has been to clam up.

ContrairiMairi Demands Illinois Election Board Investigate Obama

ContrairiMarie of Illinois has written the following letter to Dan White, Executive Director of the Illinois Board of Elections.


>Dan White, Executive Director
Illinois Board of Elections
1020 S. Spring St.
Springfield, Illinois 62704

Dear Mr. White,

I am writing to respectfully demand the Board investigate the qualifications of Barack H. Obama. In light of the Certificate of Live Birth posted at the Campaign's internet site, I feel there needs to be a full investigation of his citizenship status. Illinois statutes require that he be a citizen, and I challenge that his claim is valid. The Certificate posted has been altered. The certificate number has been removed. The document states clearly, that any alteration of it makes it invalid. I believe that removal of the certificate number does alter the document, thereby rendering it invalid.

It is the duty of the Board to insure that all legal guidelines and qualifications of any candidate running for office in this State are adhered to. He is our State Senator. That is far too important a position to leave in a questionable state. He must be required to make public, a legal documentation of his citizenship status. It also now is stated that he holds citizenship in two other countries that do not recognize dual citizenship with the United States. I am also respectfully challenging that his ownership of citizenship in either of those countries negates his U.S citizenship. If he is in fact holding multiple passports issued by countries that do not recognize dual citizenship, his American citizenship cannot be valid.
It is imperative that the residents of this State are being represented by persons who meet all the legal qualifications as set forth by Illinois law. You cannot expect that we should be governed by laws passed by someone breaking the law. Please send verification with documented proof of his status to me at the address listed.

Sincerely,

ContrairiMairi

E-mail Re Obama's Cover Up

Dear Mitchell,
Once again, MANY thanks. I nearly considered giving up the petition drive in the short run, in favor of the challenge to the FEC. I still believe that the State level IS going to be the far more effective challenge, after your mail.
But thinking over all of this has me really worried. One site claims that in a "gentlemanly process, we accept self certification", as the reason that Hussein got this far in the first place with no challenge. This is my worry....why would any opposing candidate in any election accept self certification from the opposition, unless that candidate also had something to hide.
For instance, Hilary....she has been the First Lady! One would think she would be savvy enough to challenge any opponent's qualifications. Why hasn't she? John McCain had his own citizenship challenged. Why hasn't he returned the favor? Why are these and many other candidates so accepting of the "gentlemanly process" that they accept "self certification" from an opponent so willingly? Do you find this as frightening as I now do?
Why are we at a point in Hussein's term as Senator from Illinois that ordinary citizens will be the only ones offering the challenge? And at this late date! This SHOULD have been dealt with much earlier on. I am now finding it a bit more interesting that so few "good candidates" seem to be running for office. We always seem to be choosing the lesser evil. I am not a person who believes in "conspiracy theories", but I am really wondering now what is going on behind the scenes. Why are these people granting self certification to opponents, if in fact this is what is happening?
Seems to me, if I were running a clean campaign, my first course of action would be to make sure MY OWN qualifications were airtight. I would then expect the same from my opponent. I'll bet most Americans who pay any attention at all to the political process would think that to be a fundamental of the campaign process. Aren't we getting our eyes opened the hard way with this election? We had so many candidates in the Democratic Primary, who would have thought that this close to the general election, no one knows if the Democratic Presumptive nominee is even legally qualified!
Guess Americans had best get busy setting their own rules for elections and the campaign process. Rather than leave the question of legal qualification to the opponents in an election, we need to start demanding proof of legal qualification each time someone tosses their hat into the ring! It needs to be done at every level of the election process.
Sincerely,
Mairi

Phil Orenstein on the Obama Birth Certificate Cover Up

Phil Orenstein has written a fine blog on the Obama birth certificate cover up here.

Daniel Walker Howe's Political Culture of the American Whigs

Daniel Walker Howe. The Political Culture of the American Whigs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1979. 404 pages. Available from Amazon.com for $26.60. Available used and new from $14.00.

This is a fine book. Interesting, highly informative, fun to read. Howe's writing is lucid. Books like this inspire us to learn. Howe's insights about the American Whig Party, their ideas, religion and culture are wonderful, and he covers a lot of ground. He uses a biographical approach that covers a wide range of Whig Party politicians beginning with John Quincy Adams (who became a Whig after his presidency and during his post-presidency Congressional tenure) and ending with Abraham Lincoln, not only the best-remembered Whig but also the best-remembered 19th Century politician, except perhaps for Jefferson. Of course, the Whig Party expired in 1856 and Lincoln gained the presidency as the first Republican, but his allegiance to Henry Clay never diminished.

I read the book because I became curious about the continuity of American elitist and pro-Central Bank ideology between the 18th and twentieth centuries. This book makes clear that there are many linkages between the Whigs and the Progressives, hence the New Deal (which is my own conclusion, not Professor Howe's). Nancy Cohen makes clear the link between the Mugwumps and the Progressives, and in his concluding pages Howe mentions that the Whigs mildly reasserted themselves via the Liberal Republican Party in the 1872 election, which is often referred to as an early phase of the Mugwumps' activism. Although Howe characterizes the Whigs as the "country" party, it is clear that many former Federalists became Whigs in the 1830s. It also is clear that the economic elite was associated with the Whigs just as they had been with the Federalists, niceties about political ideology aside. Thus, there is a clear line from the Federalists to the Whigs, then to the Mugwumps and then to the Progressives. The speeches of Theodore Roosevelt, himself a one-time Mugwump, make clear the connection between his own ideas and those of Franklin Roosevelt's.

One of the nice things about this book is that Howe covers the religious and evangelical elements in the Whig philosophy along with the economic and political. It is fairly clear that the evangelical social concerns, linked of course to abolitionism, form the basis of today's social democrats' concerns. The evangelical religious impulse developed in several ways, one of which was through Social Gospel Christianity, through to Progressivism and then the social welfare elements of the New Deal. The emotional commitment of social democrats to their programs can be explained in this evolution of religious feeling that has been displaced into social democracy.

This book, written as a solid piece of history, does not suggest that there is a continuous party that has favored economic centralization from the Federalists to the New Deal Democrats. But it seems clear from the evidence. For most of its history, with the exception of the Mugwump period, the centralization party has favored a central bank, public works (which were characteristic of not only of Hamilton's Federalist program but also of Henry Clay's American system, of Theodore Roosevelt's ideas and of the New Deal) and business. The Whigs, the Mugwumps and the Progessives were ambivalent about big business, although their moral concerns seem to have been easily displaced. There is little doubt that the tariffs that the Whigs implemented were in large part responsible for big business in America. The Mugwumps, at least in some instances, were willing to repeal the tariffs but the Progressives amounted to a reassertion of more aggressive Whiggery than had existed since the end of the Civil War. In the Mugwump period the urban elite became hostile to corruption of some big business. In turn, the Progressives and New Dealers in increasing progression used anti-business rhetoric to cloak their centralist orientation. The centralizing party favored tariffs in the Hamiltonian and Clay periods, then divided over tariffs during the Mugwump period. The anti-tariff position won thereafter to the extent that reductions in tariffs did not hurt American business interests.

American history occurs in cycles, with each cycle involving various combinations and variations on the issues of economic centralization, central banking, protectionism, and support for industry. Progressivism aggressively asserted the centralizing position against the late nineteenth century elitists' deviant laissez-faire philosophy. I call it deviant because in all other periods other than the late nineteenth century American elites have opposed laissez-faire in favor of corporatist, centralizing mercantilism, Progressivism and finally so-called "liberalism". It is a tribute to the power of laissez-faire that a movement that was backed primarily by working-class and small farmer Jacksonians from say 1825to today really, and had the backing of economic elites only during the post-bellum period that ended in the late 1890s, continued to provoke so much distress from university-trained economic elites, business and banking interests, organized labor and other proponents of elitist centralization through to the present.

Like the Whigs, the Progressives were advocates of a return to the corporatist mercantilism of the 17th and 18th centuries represented by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury in the 17th century and Sir James Steuart in his "Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy", published in 1767. As William Appleman Williams aptly points out in his classic Contours of American History :

"...it is possible to gain a vital insight into that contemporary liberalism which defends the right of private property and asserts the supremacy of individual liberty while at the same time advocating the general welfare. For although such liberals show superficial similarities to the mercantilists, they are considerably removed from that conservative tradition of the common good. Such liberals usually label Karl Marx a heretic and consider socialism a heresy, but the reverse is much closer to the truth. The liberal tradition stems from the triumph of laissez-faire individualism over corporate Christianity. Marx and other socialists reasserted the validity of the original idea in response to the liberal heresy. That is indeed one of the basic explanations of socialism's persistent relevance and appeal in the 20th century."*

Williams's point can be expanded a bit, because not only socialists but also Whigs and Progressives rejected the laissez-faire heresy.

As opposed to laissez-faire, the Whig Party (p. 16) "advanced a particular program of national development. The Whig economic platform called for purposeful intervention by the federal government in the form of tariffs to protect domestic industry, subsidies for internal improvements, and a national bank to regulate the currency and make tax revenues available for private investment...The Democrats inclined toward free trade and laissez-faire; when government action was required, they preferred to leave it to the states and local communities. The Whigs were more concerned with providing centralized direction to social policy...The most important single issue dividing the parties, and the source of the most acute disappointment to the Whigs after President Harrison had been succeeded by Tyler, concerned the banking systemm. Jackson's veto of the recharter of the Second Bank of the United States in 1832 became the point of departure for a generation of political partisanship". By 1860 Abraham Lincoln favored reinstitution of a central bank but was unable to effect it, and a central bank was not reinstituted until 1913, under Woodrow Wilson, who was the first of several Democratic Party Whigs.

Howe goes on to point out (p. 17):

"The banking-currency issue (that is, the right of banks to issue their own paper money) mattered at the state as well as the federal level. Many states redrafted their constitutions during the Jacksonian period and had to decide whether they would authorize state banking monopolies (usually mixed public-private corporations), specially chartered banks, free banking, or no banks of issue at all. As time went by, the parties tended to polarize with respect not only to rechartering a national bank but to the function of banking in general. The Democrats generally became more committed to hard money (specie or government-issued currency), while the Whigs became defenders of the credit system (in which banks were the issuers of currency)."

"When Democratic "Martin van Buren complained during the Panic of 1837 that people looked to the government for too much," (Whig) Henry Clay retorted that the people were "entitled to the protecting care of a paternal government." This is very much in the tradition of mercantilism.

But while on economic issues the Democrats were anti-inflation and pro-democracy, on the race issue the Democrats were pro-slavery and racism while the Whigs were less racist and more anti-slavery.

Howe argues that (p. 20):

"there is danger in calling the Whigs champions of the positive liberal state. It makes them sound too much like twentieth-century liberals. Actually, the differences between the Whigs and twentieth century liberals are more important than the similarities. Whig policies did not have the object of redistributing wealth or diminishing the influence of the privileged. Furthermore, the Whigs distrusted executives in both state and federal government (they had been traumatized by the conduct of Jackson), whereas twentieth century liberals have endorsed strong executives more often than not. For all their innovations in economic policy, the Whigs usually thought of themselves as conservatives, as custodians of an identifiable political and cultural heritage. Most deeply separating the Whigs from twentieth century liberals were their moral absolutism, their paternalism and their concern with imposing discipline...the Whigs proposed a society that would be economically diverse but culturally uniform; the Democrats preferred the economic uniformity of a society of small farmers and artisans but were more tolerant of cultural and moral diversity."

Taking the last point first, economic diversity is not an issue of importance today, but cultural uniformity is. Perhaps invisibly to Howe, twentieth century social democrats have aimed to foist a cultural uniformity on America. In the mid twentieth century they claimed that liberalism reflected the national consensus. By the 1980s they advocated political correctness. Political correctness is a moralistic impulse with Whiggish religious roots. Moreover, although the twentieth and 21st centuries have rejected the sexual morality and Aristotelian virtues characteristic of the Whigs and earlier, they have replaced these with a host of politically correct moralities with which they replace faith and tradition, to include animal rights, global warming and similar causes.

It fascinates me that Howe's argument begs the argument of Murray Rothbard, Ronald Radosh and Martin J. Sklar in New History of Leviathan that twentieth century liberalism did not aim to redistribute wealth but only used social democratic rhetoric to re enforce elitist goals. In terms of culture, there is no doubt that 20th and 21st century liberalism repudiates 19th century Whiggish elitism as well as 19th century Democratic Party racism in favor of a revised elitist philosophy based in part on similar impulses, such as claiming special status for the educated, especially the professions. Changing technology and extensions of knowledge created new economic interests in the late nineteenth century that changed the emphasis of the Whigs' descendants, the Mugwumps, into emphasizing the role of the professions, Whiggish forms of government intervention in support of the professions and rationalization of industry and government (which the Whigs would have supported). Naturally, economic conditions altered the form elitist centralization took just as religious and moral emphasis and alliances shifted.

But on the following page Howe puts the statist essence of the Whigs into focus (p. 21):

"Because of their commitment to 'improvement', Whigs were much more concerned than Democrats with providing conscious direction to the forces of change. For them, real progress was not likely to occur automatically; it required careful, purposeful planning...Whig morality was corporate as well as individual; the community, like its members, was expected to set an example of virtue and to enforce it when possible. A third recurring theme in Whig rhetoric was the organic unity of society...the Whigs were usually concerned with muting social conflict."

Seventy years later, when Frederick Winslow Taylor advocated a "mental revolution" between labor and management as part of his system of scientific management that aimied to rationalized industry, like a good Whig Progressive (and Herbert Croly specifically endorsed Taylorism) he was arguing for the organic unity of society.

The Whigs liked to draw an analogy between the human body and the political system (p. 29): "An essential feature of the analogy for the Whigs was the parallel between regulating the faculties within an individual and regulating the individuals within society. Faculty psychology tgaught an ideal of harmony within diversity...The model ruled out laissez-faire as a social philosophy, emphasizing instead the mutual responsibility of individuals and classes. The ideal society, like the ideal personality, improved its potential in many directions. Economic development promoted a healthy diversity, which 'furnishes employment for every variety of human faculty.' The conception implied an active, purposeful central government, administering the affairs of the nation according to its best judgment for the good of the whole and all parts of the whole."

This explains the difference between the Whigs and their later descendants, the Progressives and the New Dealers, as to the importance of the chief executive. By 1900 the federal government was becoming too complex to permit a legislature to make managerial decisions. Hence, advocates of centralization had to choose between no centralization and a strong legislature or centralization and and a strong executive. Obviously, centralization was more important to the centralizing party than was a weak executive. As a practical matter, centralization is impossible without a strong executive once government reaches a certain level of size and complexity. Since the Whig/Progressive/New Deal Party has been focused on expanding government to satisfy the economic interests of the professional and managerial classes, the issue of a powerful executive is a trivial one compared to the issue of increasing size and complexity of government. You can't have both.

Moreover, the Whigs anticipated today's liberal New Deal Democrats in their claim that the educated had the right to special privileges and that the educated ought to rule over the uneducated (p. 30):

"John Locke had written that people who lacked the opportunity to cultivate their higher faculties (such as women and the poor) could not become fully rational and therefore justly held subordinate positions within society...The American Whigs were less explicit than Locke, but they shared his general view that those who had not had the opportunity of education should defer to the leadership of those who had received it..."

Today, the claim of elite privilege by the educated has reached a fever pitch. I doubt that a single Congressman or member of the President's cabinet lacks a college degree. This is so even as the intellectual demands of a college education have dwindled to next to nothing and college graduates today know less than high school graduates of 100 years ago. Compare this with an observation by Herbert Hoover in 1922**:

"That our system has avoided the establishment and domination of class has a significant proof in the present administration in Washington. Of the twelve men comprising the President, Vice-President, and Cabinet, nine have earned their own way in life without economic inheritance, and eight of them started with manual labor."

Andrew Jackson and the Democratic Party violated the "politics of deference" characteristic of early American society through extending the spoils system to all classes (p. 31). This tradition continued through Hoover's time, but the Progressives and their New Deal descendants put in place policies that were less democratic. This repositioning of elitism to focus on education rather than on the traditional land and wealth criteria occurred during and before the Mugwump period. The Mugwumps emphasized the rationalization of civil service, a concept which the Progressives developed into scientific management.

To support business, Whigs supported tariffs and the central bank (p. 32). These stands appealed to wealthy business interests but not to the poor. In order to appeal to the poor, the Whigs emphasized ethnic (specifically, WASP) identity politics, and moral issues that cut across social classes. Part of this involved the evangelical Second Great Awakening as well as appeals to basic morals (p.33):

"The Whig party's electoral campaigns formed part of a cultural struggle to impose on the United States the standards of morality we usually term Victorian. They were standards of self-control and restraint, which dovetailed well with the economic program of the party, for they emphasized thrift, sobriety and public responsibility...They looked upon the Democratic voters as undisciplined."

The Whigs extended this moralism to a belief in central planning and opposition to free markets (p. 34):

"Running through Whig political appeals was the concept of consciously arranged order. This was characteristic of their reliance on government planning rather than the invisible forces of the marketplace. It was characteristic of their reliance on government planning..."

The Whigs emphasized public education, in part through the activities of Horace Mann, a Whig (p. 36): "A believer in uniformity and conscious planning, Mann wanted more centralization in school systems. Democrats, resenting higher taxes and loss of control, frequently opposed Mann and other Whig educational reformers."

In contrast to Democrats, who aimed to end economic privilege through systemic reform such as the abolition of the central bank (p. 37):

"Whig reforms were frequently altruistic efforts to redeem others rather than examples of self-help. Whigs supported Dorothea Dix's campaign for federal aid to mental hospitals; Democrats opposed. Whig prison reformers sought to make prison a place of redemption as well as retribution...Democratic prision reformers, on the other hand, were usually concerned with economy, efficiency and deterrence."

The parallels to Progressivism and the New Deal seem clear.

The Jacksonian Democrats were the ones who oppressed the Indians. For instance the Cherokee case, where the rich lands of the Five Tribes in Georgia led to their expulsion via the famously tragic "trail of tears" was a partisan Democratic policy. "Chief Justice John Marshall delivered the judgment of the United States Supreme Court in Worcester et al. v. Georgia on March 3, 1832. He found Georgia's action unconstitutional: the state had no right to legislate for the Cherokee Nation...But Georgia defied the Court's decision...and went ahead with the expulsion of the Indians. Jackson made it clear that he would never enforce the Court's mandate, and loopholes in federal appellate procedure enabled him to avoid doing so. Meanwhile, he used the Army to facilitate the dispossession of the Indians, not to protect them." Chief Justice Marshall was, of course, a Whig.

In part because of their emphasis on moral development that coincided with their belief in economic development, Whigs emphasized history to a greater extent than Democrats (p. 72). Whigs believed that a generation could bind a later generation, lending acceptability to long term mortgages. Again, we seen a hint of future big government social democracy. For instance (p. 72) the Whig William Henry Seward recommended a series of internal improvements in New York.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute quotes a Edgar Lee Masters's biography of Lincoln that states that the internal improvements of the Whigs involved a considerable degree of corruption:

"Henry Clay was their champion, and he represented 'that political system which doles favors to the strong in order to win and to keep their adherence to the government. His system offered shelter to devious schemes and corrupt enterprises.' They advocated 'a people taxed to make profits for enterprises that cannot stand alone.' The Whig party had 'no platform to announce, because its principles were plunder and nothing else.' These men 'adopted the tricks of the pickpocket who dresses himself like a farmer in order to move through a rural crowd unidentified while he gathers purses and watches.'...Lincoln in the 1830s succeeded in having the legislature allocate $12 million in an absurd make-work scheme to turn Illinois into one vast system of government-subsidized canals and railroad lines...The scheme was a colossal failure as virtually all of the money was stolen or squandered. Lincoln's law partner, William Herndon, called the scheme 'reckless and unwise' and a disaster that 'rolled up a debt so enormous' that it impeded Illinois' economic growth for many years. 'The internal improvement system, the adoption of which Lincoln had played such a prominent part, had collapsed,' Herndon wrote in his biography of Lincoln."

These points contradict some in Howe's book, but Howe does not address the issue of corruption in the actual implementation of the public works projects that Whigs like Lincoln did implement. It is not surprising that corruption was involved, nor is it surprising that ideologically the Whigs might not have addressed this issue despite or rather because of the moralism in their belief system. On the other hand, Howe's evidence does not support DiLorenzo's claim that the Whigs did not have a platform. On some issues, such as treatment of the Indians, Whig opposition to the Mexican War (which was a Jacksonian plicy) and abolition, there was considerably more overlap between the Whigs' position and the libertarian one that DiLorenzo advocates. Nor is it fair to dismiss the mercantilist view as one that intentionally encouraged corruption. The economic development of Britain between 1600 and 1840 was one of the dramatic feats of economic development in the history of the world, and it occurred under a primarily mercantilist ideology. It might have been better to have adopted the ideas of Murray Rothbard in 1600, but it also might have been better if jets and cellular phones had been available to Clay, Biddle and Lincoln.

Like Libertarians, Jacksonian Democrats feared the emergence of a plutocratic elite. However, the Whigs saw a threat "in the perversion of the political process by demagogoues taking advantage of the loss of an independent spirit among the people" (p. 76) and they saw Jackson himself as a demagogue. Like the Federalists, the Whigs emphasized not democracy but balance. In their view (p. 77) "the purpose of government is not to implement popular will but to balance and harmonize interests." Balanced government, of course, is the theme of the Federalist Papers. The Whigs emphasized the national origin of the Constitution. They did not believe that the Constitution originated with the states. The federal government is mixed, neither wholly federal nor wholly consolidated.

(p. 77) "The most salient characteristic of American Whig political thought was that it remained within the tradition of the "commonwealthmen," that remarkable group of English and Scottish writers...Two favorite writers in the tradition were James Harrington and Viscount Bolingbroke."

(p. 78) "That the Whigs who advocated industrialization and economic development should have identified with a political heritage called 'country' may seem at first anomalous. Actually, however, the word 'country' was understood more in opposition to 'court' than in opposition to 'city'. Within the English 'country party' not only landed gentlemen but also bourgeois Protestant Dissenters were prominent...As a group that included both townsmen and commercial farmers, and as inheritors of the religious tradition of English Dissent, the Whigs found the country-party tradition congenial."

p. 90 "Both Whigs and Democrats claimed to be heirs of the Republican Party of Jefferson though both in fact contained some some former Federalists. Ex-Federalists like Daniel Webster became willing to cite Jefferson as an opponent of executive power once they had become Whigs. The closest ideological predecessors of the Whigs seem to have been not the Federalists but the 'moderate' or 'nationalistic' wing of the Republicans. This group combined, as the Whigs did later, a country-party respect for consitutional balance, legal tradition and executive restraint with belief in federally sponsored economic development and government 'for' rather than 'by' the people. The archetypal representative of this brand of Republicanism, and the patron of Whiggery, was James Madison. It is well known (or it should be) that Jefferson disapproved of Jackson's candidacy in 1824; it is even more significant that Madison and Gallatin, who were still alive in 1832, when the issues of the Jacksonian era had been clearly drawn, supported Clay for president that year."

"The Whig defeat in 1844 entailed consequences of imponderable magnitude, leading as it did to war with Mexico and exacerbated sectional antagonism. War was traditionally an evil in country-party ideology, dreaded not only for its cost in blood and money but because it provided an occasion for executive aggrandizement. President Polk's devious and provocative conduct, both before and afterthe beginning of hostilities, provided plenty of confirmation for such fears" (p. 92)

Howe provides fascinating biographies of two Whig entrepreneurs: Nathan Appleton and Henry Carey. Appleton founded various textile mills, including most famously an early joint stock company called the Merrimack Manufacturing Company. Appleton named the company town "Lowell" after a deceased partner. The firm made early forays into human resource management on a dramatic scale:

"The company built homes for the households of its male supervisory employees and boardinghouses for its unamrried female operatives; it supplied the town with a school, a hospital and a library, whose resources made possible the magazine the employees put out, the famous Lowell Offering. It was by no means sufficient for the proprietors to provide what they thought were wholesome working and living conditions at Lowell. They desired to preserve the morals of the people there to be gathered. With this in mind, they built or subsidized eight churces, exercised strict supervision over the workers' private lives and founded a savings bank...Lowell Massachusetts represented social innovation as much as technological innovation. In its original conception, it was to be not only a company town but also an experimental utopia...Lowell illustrates the Whig desire to remake the world...most of the workers were isolated from their families and lived regimented lives of hard work, chastity and diligent uplift...the workers would be women...By hiring women the Merrimack Manufacutring Company could pay lower wages than British industry was paying men..."

(p. 104) "In reply to Democratic charges that corporations were conspiratorial and elitist, Whig defenders of corporations (mixed or private) insisted that they conferred great benefit on savers of modest means by allowing them to participate with the rich in the profits of incorporated business. This was why John Quincy Adams could speak of the 'truly republican institution of joint stock companies.'"

Appleton and his associates founded a private banking system based in Boston. As a result, New England was not dependent on the bank of the United States for a uniform circulating medium. "Member banks in many New England towns would desposit sufficient funds to guarantee their notes at the Suffolk Bank in Boston. In consideration for the use of their money, the Suffolk Bank would redeem the notes of the out-of-town banks at par instead of discounting them. Thus a uniform circulating medium and banking reserve requirements were maintained within the region..." (p. 106).

Henry Carey (p. 109) "identified himself with what might be called the commercial wing of Jeffersonian Republicanism, advocating internal improvements, a protective tariff, a national bank, and reconciliation with the Federalists--in short, the Madisonian Platform." Carey was a moral philosopher and economist (p. 111) "who believed America would be a better place to live if it could industrialize." He believed that "genuine full employment was both the means to economic progress and, for Carey, the end of economic progress. Carey was a feminist and argued that economic development held out considerable promise to women (p. 112). He believed in a mixed economy, capitalism combined with government intervention (remember, this was the 1830s--the idea that a mixed economy was "progressive" was a claim of the 1900's-1930s, 70-100 years after Carey). "Government policy should add...what is today called social overhead--a transportation network and an educational system. To keep the economy expanding, the burden of taxation should not be oppressive, but in the United States in Carey's time there was little danger of this. Carey laid the most stress on a plentiful money supply and a protective tariff to prevent this money from being drained off...Taken together, trhese policies would secure investment capital, increase productivity and raise wages..."

"Carey looked to technology to solve the differences between capital and labor" (P. 113). Carey's philosophy had Christian and moral overtones (p. 114). He believed in progress and opposed Malthus and the Manchester school. He advocated a culture of progress (by which he meant economic as opposed to political progress).

Whigs may have been the first advocates of suburbanization. "Whiggery was an outlook more appropriate to villagers or townsmen than to either frontiersmen or city dwellers....in many parts of the country where the Whig party was strongest it was asociated with a longing to recreate the early New England town settlement." (p. 116). Whig candidates generally outpolled Democrats in the cities (p. 117). "The Whig desire to preserve rural values within an urban context eventually led to important developments in urban park and cemetary landscape architecture, culminating after the Civil War in the genius of Frederick Law Olmstead". Olmstead was a Mugwump associate of EL Godkin.

Le Corbusier is generally recognized as the ideological forerunner of Robert Moses, but Moses seems to bear some things in common with the Whigs, specifically, the notion of the need to introduce country-like super-blocks would seem to echo Olmstead's concept of a park within a city (although when Olmstead designed Central Park it was on the northern end of the city). Moses would seem to have fulfilled the Whiggish tradition, both in terms of being a master public works builder and one who introduced urban America to the suburbs through highway building and superblocks.

Carey opposed trade, viewing it as parasitic and exploitative. He viewed the Irish potato famine as indicative of the problems that trade can cause (p. 118) "The same Carey who praised the small-to-medium-scale capitalism of the town deplored the large-scale capitalism of the metropolis. A trading economy corrupted its own society...Within cities a submerged 'proletariat' appeared...The trading classes lived by appropriation of wealth created by others." The Whig ideology had an anti-capitalist flavor at times, which parallels Progressivism seven decades later. Carey believed that the evils of trade could be overcome with a protective tariff. Protectionism led to "a diversified economy" which would "provide a healthy human environemnt for varied talents." A diversified economy secured people's independence against intimidation. (p. 122) "The great triumph of Carey's life came with the passage of the Morrill Tariff of 1862, commencing a century of American protectionism that would last until the Kennedy round of economic conferences. Yet instead of a decentralized 'middle zone' of opportunity and morality, economic consolidation and further urbanization characterized the high tariff era. The idea that protection was only a transitional phase for infant industries was ignored." This brings us back to the Rothbard/Radosh thesis. Were the Whigs merely fools to advocate tariffs to encourage "a diversified economy" instead of big business, or were they merely front men for big business interests?

Henry Clay

"Henry Clay believed in stability and order" (p. 123). (p. 139) "The Bank issue brought into sharp focus the conflict between the two views of the nation's destiny: Clay's vision of economic development planned centrally by a capitalist elite and the Democratic vision of a land of equal opportunity. Even after the Bank's charter finally expired in 1836, banking and currency remained the subject of bitterest partisan debate." (p. 146) "The conjunction of commerce with Christianity was typical of the Whig version of imperialism". Clay adopted the ideas of Henry Carey. He (p. 137) advocated revenue sharing or distribution of federal money to the states. His American System "was predicated on the basis of a harmony of interests" 9P. 138). The Whigs argued for class harmony and mutuality of interests.

Lyman Beecher

Lyman Beecher represented the evangelical dimension of the Whigs. "The tradition of Edwardsean eschatology had been transmitted to Beecher via Timothy Dwight, Edwards's grandson, who became president of Yale during Beecher's undergraduate years. The continuity of evangelical thought remained unbroken during the time of the Whig party; the providential interpretation of history that one finds in Edwards' accounts of the Reformation or the Glorious Revolution appears in the writings of Whigs as late as the 1840s...Like Edwards--and John Quincy Adams--Beecher believed in postmillennialism, the doctrine that the Second Coming will occur at the end of the thousand years of peace...The Second Coming was not far off...One last big effort would do it--or rather two: the establishment of foreign missions to complete the conversion of the world and the moral renovation of American society to give Christ a beachhead for His return." (p. 152)

p. 152-3: the one hopeful source that the Whigs had was postmillenial theology. Their other sources were the classical writers and some economists who were pessimistic. The secular authors the Whigs read "espoused a limited view of the possibilities for human achievement...The evangelical movement supplied Whiggery with a conception of progress that was the collective form of redemption: like the individual, society as a whole was capable of improvement through conscious effort. Nineteenth century evangelicism, even more than eighteenth century evangelicism, demanded the moral regeneration of society, not simply of the individuals within it. Again, there are hints of Progressivism.

p. 154 "When Lyman Beecher declared that 'the stated policy of heaven is to raise the world from its degraded condition' he had in mind not only its spiritual but also its intellectual and material condition..."

p. 156 "In his 'Lectures on Political Atheism'...Beecher begins by arguing that Christianity is the ally of social progress and liberty...Biblical Christianity, that is Protestantism, promotes schools, morality, economic enterprise and relative social equality..."

The Whigs' ideology was institutionalist and evolutionary, as was that of Progressives like John R. Commons and John Dewey. The Democrats saw institutions as threatening liberty. (p. 182) "Whigs, however felt that institutions provided the structures that made freedom meaningful. Institutions could evolve to cope with changing circumstances; they could serve as intermediaries for redemption, as the benevolent societies did. Whig institutionalism was by no means incompatible with antislavery...European conservatives in the nineteenth century sometimes found that progressive legislation suited their purposes, as Bismarck and Disraeli well illustrate. Lord John Russell put their policy nicely: 'There is nothing so conservative as progress.' This attitude--that a measure of progress is desirable to forestall more drastic upheavals--was certainly not unknown among the American Whigs...'True conservatism,' a party spokesman affirmed, operates not by indiscriminate resistance to change, but the intelligent and seasonable combination of Order and Improvement."

(p. 182) "The economic, social, cultural and moral proram of the Whigs can be characterized in a broad sense as that of a modernizing elite, a bourgeois elite that was open to the talents of an upwardly mobile Lincoln or Greeeley...the modernizing of social organization during this time was pioneered to a great extent by paternalists...(Jackson) and his Democratic Party were primarily defending a society of independent yeoman and artisans, who were threatened by the kind of modernization the Whigs envisaged...As exemplars of Whigs who were deliberate modernizers, Horace Greeley and William Henry Seward serve well."

I disagree with Howe there. Although the Whigs claimed to advocate modernization, the most important modernizing steps occurred outside of the "American System" of Clay and Lincoln. These included the inventions of the late nineteenth century which occurred despite government not because of it. Because historians tend to emphasize institutions, philosophers, ideologues and political structures they fail to see the spontaneous change that occurs because of the Jacksonian impulse. This institutionalist bias in history results in mistaken and destructive policy conclusions that are drawn from failure to grasp the role of markets. Getting back to Howe:

(p. 187) "Greeley favored workers' cooperatives, supported the ten-hour day, and joined the printers' union; yet anything that smacked of class conflict was abhorrent to him. He advocated collective bargaining but felt that it should lead to binding arbitration rather than strikes. Since capital and labor did not seem to Greeley to have opposing interests, arbitration commended itself to him as peaceful, rational and just.

"Social reform did not, for Greeley, necessarily mean opposition to the interests or wishes of capitalists. He supported limited liability and the Whig Bankruptcy Act of 1841, admired the Lowell textile mills, and endorsed industrialization in general...Greeley belonged to a generation that could think of business itself as a moral cause." (p. 188)

"It makes it easier to understand Greeley if we note his remarkable similarity to the 'progressives' of the early twentieth century. Like them, he wanted to rationalize the existing social order and make it more humane. Through the Tribune he advocated such protprogressive casues as a national presidential primary, an income tax, the abolition of capital punishment, and the direct election of United States Senators...Almost alone among American newspapers, the Tribune gave thorough coverage and serious attention to the women's rights movement...Like most Whigs, Greeley retained a strong sense of the moral qualities of rural and small town life, even while favoring industrialization" (p. 195).

William H. Seward was a Whig who supported subsidies to business. Like Warren G. Harding, who supported subsidies to the merchant marine 80 years later, "He endorsed subsidies for the Collins Steamship Company to help it compete against the British Cunard Line...Seward's interest in American commercial activity in the Pacific was not without prcedent among the Whigs. Daniel Webster, when he was secretary of state, extended the scope of the Monroe Doctrine to include the Hawaiian Islands.

The Whigs combined an interest in "improvements" with a fundamental conservatism, and they emphasized "protecting property, maintaining social order, and preserving a distinct cultural heritage." Whigs and pro-bank Democrats were called "conservatives" in the 1830s, a usage that does not seem altogether different from the way the term is used today. "As a party, the Whigs wanted conservatism and progress to blend their harmonious action" (p. 210). Daniel Webster, one of the best-remembered Whigs, "has aptly been called a broker-state politician who thought of government policy in terms of adjusting the claims of propertied interests to government favors...In his mind, social organization legitimated encouraging economic modernization through special favors to property."

Again it is a serious mistake to confuse policies that encourage modernization with modernization itself. The abolition of the central bank may have caused more modernsization than the conscious policies of the Whigs. Conscious policies may be destructive if our minds are not capable of grasping the complexities of market phenomena, a contribution of Friedrich A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises in the 1920s and 1930s.

Abraham Lincoln was especially attracted to internal improvements. "Of all items in the Whig program, internal improvements held the greatest appeal for the young Lincoln.He shared the typical Whig aspiration for humanity to triumph over its physical environment. His first political platform, announcing his unsuccessful candidacy for the legislature in 1832, stressed the need for internal improvements, adi to education, and easy credit in promoting the development of the West...Lincoln was also an orthodox Whig on the crucial tariff and banking issues...In the 1830s and 1840s Lincoln consistently defended both state and national banking. To him, the assault on the Bank of the United States was part of a general breakdown of respect for property and morality that was also manifesting itself in lynch law...Lincoln was still arguing for the constitutionality of a national bank as a congressman in 1848 and even raised the issue several times in his great debates with Douglas a decade later."

"Believing that only those who paid taxes should vote, he opposed universal manhood suffrage. In an aggressively male society, he advocated votes for women."

Quoted, p. 266, from Robert Kelley "Ideology and Political Culture from Jefferson to Nixon", American Historical Review, 82, June 1977, 545.

Lincoln was a big supporter of Henry Clay. When the Republicans replaced the Whigs, the new party system "revealed a recombination of the cultural elements that had made up the old one. Douglas Democrats had come to endorse economic development, while Republicans now endorsed the westward movement. On strictly economic issues, there was little difference between them save for the tariff." (p. 289)

Lincoln synthesized elements of Jacksonian political thought with Whiggery. "Lincoln took over what was best in Jacksonian Democracy, the commitment to the rights of the common man." Lincoln reasserted the importance of the Declaration of Independence and "the proposition that all men are created equal" became a positive goal for political action" (p. 291).



*William Appleman William, The Contours of American History. Chicago: Quadrangle Paperbacks, 1966, p. 38.

**Herbert Hoover, American Individualism. New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1922, p. 21.

House Republicans Tricked Into Supporting Obama Aid Measure

Senator Barack Obama's foreign aid proposal ought to be enough to dissuade any conservative bolter. Unsurprisingly, the M-S-M has not emphasized it enough.

On February 12, Cliff Kincaid of Accurary in Media (AIM) reported that Joe Biden and the Senate have supported Barack Obama's "Global Poverty Act", which has received too little attention from television and M-S-M sources. According to Kincaid, the legislation:

"would commit the U.S. to spending 0.7 percent of gross national product on foreign aid, which amounts to a phenomenal 13-year total of $845 billion over and above what the U.S. already spends."

Kincaid notes that:

"The bill, which has the support of many liberal religious groups, makes levels of U.S. foreign aid spending subservient to the dictates of the United Nations."

Contrairiimarie just forwarded the following excerpt from a July 29, 2008 Investors' Business Daily article:

"A plan by Barack Obama to redistribute American wealth on a global level is moving forward in the Senate...if the Global Poverty Act (S. 2433) he has sponsored becomes law, which is almost certain if he wins in November, we're also going to be taxpayers of the world... Obama's Global Poverty Act offers us a global socialist destiny we do not want...It calls for the 'eradication of poverty' in part through the 'redistribution (of) wealth of land' and 'a fair distribution of the earth's resources.' In other words: American resources...Obama's bill would force U.S. taxpayers to fork over 0.7% of our gross domestic product every year to fund a global war on poverty...During a time of economic uncertainty, the plan would cost every American taxpayer around $2,500."

Kincaid of AIM adds:

"The House version (H.R. 1302), sponsored by Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), had only 84 co-sponsors before it was suddenly brought up on the House floor last September 25 and was passed by voice vote. House Republicans were caught off-guard, unaware that the pro-U.N. measure committed the U.S. to spending hundreds of billions of dollars."

Can we not ask a little honesty of Mr. Obama, who seems to put little stock in openness or truthfulness, but asks us to rely on his good faith and judgment in increasing taxes to ever greater heights for his bird-brained, social democratic schemes?

WireandMedia on the Illinois Birth Certificate Petition

Hat tip ReunionPI, WireandMedia gave this coverage to Barack Obama's supporters' attack on this blog:

Illinois Petition for Investigation of Barack Obama’s Birth Certificate

X -Posted from Mitchell Langbert’s Blog H/T Larwyn I have it on good authority that yesterday 7/31/08 Mitchell Langbert was locked out of his blog by Google/Blogspot. Mind you the post date is Thursday, July 31, 2008. His blog was reported as a spam blog. One day people! IT ONLY TOOK ONE DAY FOR OBOTS TO ATTACK! FASCISTS! Illinois Petition for Investigation of Barack Obama’s Birth Certificate Thursday, July 31, 2008 contrairimairi@aol.com has drafted a petition for residents of Illi

My Blog is Back---Obama's Supporters and His Corrupt Candidacy

Barack Obama's supporters tricked Google and Blogger, the Google subsidiary that manages Blogspot, into denying me access to this blog since yesterday. They just let me back on. Obama supporters reported my blog as "spam", i.e., as engaging in fraudulent activity that violates the firm's terms of agreement, because I posted contrarimarii's petition here. Raquel Okyay and Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs have covered this story and I appreciate their support.

Previously, many other anti-Obama bloggers have been attacked in this way. Pamela lists several blogs that have received similar treatment from Obama supporters:

Blue Lyon @ http://bluelyon.blogspot.com
Come A Long Way @ http://comealongway.blogspot.com
Hillary or Bust @ http://hillaryorbust.blogspot.com
McCain Democrats @ http://mccaindemocrats.blogspot.com
NObama Blog @ http://nobamablog.blogspot.com
politicallizard.blogspot.com @ http://thelizardannex.blogspot.com
Reflections in Tyme @ http://reflections-in-tyme.blogspot.com

As well, ReunionPI has forwarded a link to Bloggasm that discusses this as well as a New York Times blog about this when Obama supporters were doing it to Hillary supporters (of course, the Times will not note when Obama supporters do it to McCain supporters since McCain supporters are not of the aristocratic, New Deal Whig Democratic caste). Also thanks to Rorschach, Contrairimaiiri and Jim of Gateway Pundit who were supportive. Most of all thanks to Larwyn who was terrifically supportive through a painful illness.

I have drafted a letter to Google's Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, Vincent Cerf, that I plan to edit over the next few days. I have copied the first draft below.

This incident sheds a bit more light on Mr. Obama. It is fair to judge a candidate by the nature of his supporters. Nor is this kind of behavior unrelated to a long history of left-wing hooliganism and violence. The ideology of socialism is the most macabre in the history of the world. Obama does not claim to be a socialist, but rather a "progressive", a social democrat, who utilizes socialistic rhetoric but avoids being pinned down to appeal to his real clientele: investment bankers, Morgan Stanley, George Soros and Warren Buffett.

The line between socialists and social democrats is thin. Theodore Roosevelt was a "Progressive" but by the end of his presidency he was a socialist, and he was an overt socialist during his Progressive Party or Bull Moose Party presidential bid in 1912. During this period one of his chief advisers was George W. Perkins, a prominent financier and associate of JP Morgan. Many of Franklin D. Roosevelt's ideas were indeed enunciated in Theodore's speeches, and the claim that there was a big difference between the Republican Progressives along with President Woodrow Wilson and the New Deal is claptrap.

Social democrats are not Lockean in their core but pragmatic in function, as Louis Hartz claimed. Nor are they "moderate". Social democrats argue that they can use state violence to implement their ideology, but they have no evidence that their ideology works. Hence, social democracy involves the use of violence to enforce stupidity. Historically, Bismarck concretely implemented social democracy in Germany in the late nineteenth century and it influenced American ideology through the thousands of Americans who attended German universities during that period. Within 50 years of Bismarck's introduction of "liberalism", actually social democracy, in Germany Hitler rose to power. Today, we are seeing an America impoverished because of New Deal social democracy. The liars in the social democratic institutions, the New York Times and the universities will do all they can to distract you from the simple evidence, for instance today's poor benefit/contribution ratio of social security or the underlying cause of inflation and declining real wages, the Federal Reserve Bank.

The naked lust for power cloaked in the garb of "change", "justice", "reform" or "revolution" is nothing new. There was enough blood let in the last century to drown all of Obama's supporters. The willingness to defraud, lie, and manipulate is characteristic of a social democratic or socialist demagogue like Mr. Obama. The deceit that Mr. Obama's followers exhibit characterizes his campaign's values.

Here is my letter to Mr. Cerf

PO Box 130
West Shokan, NY 12494
Vinton G. Cerf
Vice President & Chief Internet Evangelist
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

Dear Mr. Cerf:

I am writing to alert you to a management problem with Blogger and was hoping that you could direct this to the appropriate party. The problem has some public relations and policy ramifications and so I thought it might be of interest to top management.

I am an associate professor at Brooklyn College in New York and have been blogging on Blogger for about a year or two at www.mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com. I was locked out of adding any blogs yesterday because a "robot" indicated that my blog is "spam". However, when I told several others about this issue, they indicated that many Blogger blogs that are critical of Barack Obama have been blocked for spam reasons. Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs, the New York Times and Blogasm blog this:

http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2008/06/google-shuts-...

http://bloggasm.com/whos-responsible-for-shutting-down-a-number-of-anti-obama-blogspot-accounts

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/google-and-the-anti-obama-bloggers/

Google put a block on my blog when I wrote a piece about an Illinois woman who is circulating a petition to obtain Mr. Obama’s birth certificate. It so happens that Blogger put a block on my account the same day that I had about 250 visits to this particular entry mostly via FreeRepublic.com.

My access was restored in a day, and I do appreciate your firm's abilities. Moreover, I do not believe that this is Google's direct fault but there does seem to be a control problem whereby you have allowed the problem of spam blogs to outweigh the risk of spam reports of spam blogs. If what Pamela Geller is saying in her Atlas Shrugs link above is so, as a statistician would put it, Google is allowing an "alpha" or probability of rejecting the assumption that nothing is wrong at a much too high level. Put another way, Google is trusting malicious complainers and permitting them to staunch the free speech of honest bloggers.

I raise this question with Google’s management because your policy against Spam has been turned into a policy that facilitates a malicious form Spam—the kind that suppresses free discourse and exploits your firm into becoming a tool of the Obama campaign. The individuals who are reporting something like 10 anti-Obama sites as Spam are as culpable as those who would use your company’s blog site for unethical purposes. Hence, there needs to be better balance in your policy, and Google needs to improve its PR by coming out and publicly stating that you support free speech and that you will block further complaints from those who complained about my and the other blogs.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

Obama's Divisiveness Aims to Distract Voters

One of the old tricks of European monarchies, social democracies and communist states for millenia past has been to distract the people from economic mismanagement and decline by introducing a scape goat or highly charged issue to deflect public attention. Perhaps the classic literary example of this is in the beginning of Shakespeare's Henry V when the Archbishop of Canterbury designs to suggest to the King that he is entitled to the kingdom of France under the Law of Salique in order to distract him from considering imposing a tax on church lands. And, of course, the Czars of Russia and later the Communist regimes frequently used the Jews to distract the populace from the mismanagement and poverty that the highly centralized feudalist system of Russia entailed. This strategem continued on through the Communist era. Today, Le Pen of France attempts a similar strategy.

The Obama campaign resorts to the "distraction card" in order to deflect attention from his intent to reenforce failed social democratic economic policies, especially the Federal Reserve Bank, economic regulation and cartelization of health care, that have increasingly impoverished the average American. Since the international gold standard was abolished in 1971, workers' average hourly real wage has declined worse than one percent per year, but the mass media has been telling the public that there is no inflation and that things are great because of cell phones even though both parents now work two jobs whereas thirty years ago one parent worked one job. Academic economists, the media's high brow equivalent, attribute economic decline to marginal income tax rates, a non-sequitor.

Given the economic instability that the social democratic system has created that go well beyond nonsensical explanations like marginal tax rates, Obama has decided to emphasize divisive race issues. Thus, John McCormack of Weekly Standard (hat tip Larwyn) reports that ABC News has video of Barack Obama telling voters in Missouri that the Republicans

"are going to try to...make you scared of me. You know he--oh, he's not patriotic enough. He's got a funny name. You know, he doesn't look like all of those other presidents on those dollar bills."

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt (hat tip Larwyn) reports that Obama favors reparations:

"I consistently believe that when it comes to whether it's Native Americans or African-American issues or reparations, the most important thing for the U.S. government to do is not just offer words, but offer deeds."

By raising the reparations issue Obama aims to distract Americans from the economic pain that they are about to suffer at the hands of our national economic planning czars, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson and their identical-twin-replacements under an Obama administration. What better way to distract from economic crisis than the reparations bugaboo?

Illinois Petition for Investigation of Barack Obama's Birth Certificate

contrairimairi@aol.com has drafted a petition for residents of Illinois that demands an investigation of Barack Obama's birth certificate. If you live in Illinois please sign the petition, pass it around to your friends and forward it to her at contrairimairi@aol.com:

We, the undersigned residents of the State of Illinois, hereby demand that Barack Hussein Obama produce documentation of American citizenship in the form of a legal birth certificate. It is our understanding that Mr. Obama has heretofore refused to produce such a document. The residency requirement for qualification as a United States Senator includes United States citizenship. Without documentation, under United States law, Barack Hussein Obama may not legally qualify to represent the citizens of the State of Illinois. By signing this petition, we request that the State of Illinois investigate Mr. Obama's eligibility to serve in the Senate and make his birth certificate public immediately, and that with continued coverup
of documentation, we demand Mr. Obama's immediate removal from the Senate.

Previously, Rorschach of the Red Ink: Texas blog has reported that a petitioner closed down his petition because Obama supporters threatened him. The Obama candidacy is truly divisive in a way that the United States has not seen for a quarter century.

>"One person put up a website for an online petition calling for the REAL birth certificate to be released, but within hours of it going up, someone, using the site operator's home address, left a veiled threat against the site operator and his family.

"Petition Closed...A veiled threat was made against myself and my family which included our home address, so I have decided to close the petition for good. It is truly sad that political discourse in our country has come to this. "

The American Media Crisis--The One Who Pays Is You

The media's monotonous support for the Obama campaign ratchets my curiosity about its declining standards. Yellow journalism and bias go back to the Federalist period of American history and before, and Jefferson was not above planting friendly journalists in positions in order to maximally irritate his opponents. But there are several differences between the factionalism of today's media and that of only a few decades ago. In the 1960s, there was still a significant degree of variability in the opinions of the major New York newspapers. Today, television and newspaper outlets conform to a social democratic norm and are increasingly shrill.

Conservatives believe that there is a liberal bias in the media and this is in part true. The corporate and financial interests that control the television and newspaper outlets are corporatist and social democratic because social democracy supports their financial interests. Thus, to understand the reason for the media's liberal bias, it is necessary to fathom the corporate interests that control the major media outlets and the economic conditions that favor their health.

Social democracy has always been a method by which corporate power deceives and controls a naive public. The history of the Progressives and the New Deal as ensuing from the exercise of a broadened interpretation of corporate power, that is for instance, as opposed to small business power, is well documented. The increased stridency of the mass media not only in support of Barack Obama but in its shrill uniformity (examples are MSNBC's Chris Matthews and CNN's Jack Cafferty and Lou Dobbs) suggest a crisis of confidence on the part of American elites. The crisis is economic and it is in its early stages.

The Bush administration has intensified the inflation of the past 25 years to a point that will necessitate a recession. But American financial and business institutions have been considerably weakened due to mismanagement and may not withstand a recession. The media's advertisers and corporate owners are in for a rough ride.

Wealth has been reallocated away from the economy's productive sectors such as manufacturing and agriculture, and the manufacturing firms as in the automobile industry that might be able to produce value are frequently not globally competitive. For them to become competitive the dollar needs to depreciate to the point where their exports become so. This will attract talent back to productive areas of the economy but will reduce the wealth base and force many Americans to reduce their living standards. As well, the reduction in the purchasing power of the dollar will be associated with an influx of dollars from abroad, causing additional price inflation here. This will cause instability. The reason for the price inflation is of course Federal Reserve policy that has subsidized the same firms that advertise through the mass media and include the mass media firms themselves.

In response to the depreciating dollar the Fed will need to raise interest rates. This will cause difficulties and perhaps bankruptcy of major American firms.

The mass media adopts an increasingly lock step tone in order to prepare for a series of economic crises whose causes it aims to distort. The beneficiaries of the long inflation of the past 25 years have been top managers, Wall Street and hedge funds. Oil speculation is not really an important component of this, and the media's recent tap dance about oil speculation is evidence of how it will continue to lie about the economic problems in the next decade. Barack Obama has received more donations from Wall Street and the financial community than has John McCain. He will avoid, with media support, addressing the underlying sources of the need for adjustment.

The one who pays is you.

My Neighbor and American Ingenuity

My neighbor had his sister's pressure washer for a few weeks. I hired him to do our front chimney at our house in West Shokan. The chimney hadn't been cleaned since Clayton's uncle built it in the 1950s. My neighbor is very talented. There is still some old fashioned American inegenuity left:

Before

























After

William Graham Sumner on 19th Century Corporate Fraud and Government Subsidies to Business

The Progressive movement that developed in the 1890s into one of the most important political movements of the twentieth century was in large part a reaction to the development of big business and the trusts of the late nineteenth century. Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican as were the vast majority of Progressives, ultimately believed that nationalization or at least federal licensure of big business firms was necessary to ensure that trusts remained good and reasonable.

But did the very existence of trusts depend at least in part on government subsidies in the first place? This is what William Graham Sumner wrote in 1883 about corporate fraud and government subsidies to business:

"I have said something disparagingly in a previous chapter about the popular rage against combined capital, corporations, corners, selling futures, etc., etc. The popular rage is not without reason, but it is sadly misdirected and the real things which deserve attack are thriving all the time. The greatest social evil with which we have to contend is jobbery. Whatever there is in legislative charters, watering stocks, etc., etc., which is objectionable, comes under the head of jobbery. Jobbery is any scheme which aims to gain, not by the legitimate fruits of industry and enterprise, but by extorting from somebody a part of his product under guise of some pretended industrial undertaking. Of course, it is only a modification when the undertaking in question has some legitimate character, but the occasion is used to graft upon it devices for obtaining what has not been earned. Jobbery is the vice of plutocracy, and it is the especial form under which plutocracy corrupts a democratic and republican form of government. The United States is deeply afflicted with it, and the problem of civil liberty here is to conquer it. It affects everything which we really need to have done to such an extent that we have to do without public objects which we need through fear of jobbery. Our public buildings are jobs--not always, but often. They are not needed, or are costly beyond all necessity or even decent luxury. Internal improvements are jobs. They are not made because they are needed to meet needs which have been experienced. They are made to serve private ends, often incidentally the political interests of the persons who vote the appropriations. Pensions have become jobs...The California gold-miners have washed out gold, and have washed the dirt down into the rivers and on the farms below. They want the Federal Government to now clean out the rivers and restore the farms. The silver-miners found their product declining in value, and they got the Federal Government to go into the market and buy what the public did not want in order to sustain (as they hoped) the price of silver. The Federal Government is called upon to buy or hire unsalable ships, to build canals which will not pay, to furnish capital for all sorts of experiments, and to provide capital for enterprises of which private individuals will win profits. All this is called 'developing our resources' but it is, in truth, the great plan of all living on each other.

"The greatest job of all is a protective tariff. It includes the biggest log-rolling and the widest corruption of economic and political ideas...The farmers have long paid tribute to the manufacturers; now the manufacturing and other laborers are to pay tribute to the farmers. The system is made more comprehensive and complete, and we all are living on each other more and more...

"...Attention is all absorbed by the clamorous interests, the importunate petitioners, the plausible schemers, the pitiless bores. Now who is the victim? He is the Forgotten Man...."

Social Democratic Fallacies

Social democracy, which has at various times inappropriately been called liberalism and progressivism, is a doctrine that has created problems in the name of problem solving. Among the first to recognize the pattern of social democracy's multiplying and intensifying problems was William Graham Sumner in his essay "What Social Classes Owe to Each Other", first published in 1883. Toward the end of this small book, Sumner describes the "forgotten man", not the poor man who is the beneficiary of proposed regulation, but the third party whom the reformer aims to coerce and who will pay an escalating price for the reformer's fallacious schemes.

Since Sumner wrote the essay, we have seen urban renewal programs supposedly aimed to help the poor that drove jobs and housing from cities, resulting in homelessness and escalating real estate values that destroyed the possibility of urban life for all but the wealthy. We have seen welfare programs that have institutionalized poverty. We have seen massive subsidies to failed corporations that encourage a culture of incompetence and waste in a business community that is already self indulgent. We have seen a housing code in New York City whose aim is to further inflate construction costs. We have seen housing prices rise, and when they declined slightly, a declaration of a "crisis" because bankers, whose job it is to lend intelligently, could not be bothered to screen borrowers. We have seen earmarks and bridges to nowhere. We have seen billions squandered in cancer research that has been politicized to the point where Fortune Magazine asserts that cures have been staunched by senior academic researchers who feel threatened by new theories. We have seen high schools graduate seniors who can barely read, and universities graduate semi-literate college seniors under failed, progressive education theories. We have seen one social democratic blunder after the next, and as Sumner put it, the forgotten man or woman is the one who pays.

What is this social democratic doctrine to which our nation has found itself committed? Social democratic and progressive ideologies dominate both the Republican and Democratic Parties, yet the assumptions that their advocates make deviate from the core beliefs of most Americans, core beliefs that are pragmatic and liberal in the Lockean sense. Social democracy is neither pragmatic nor liberal, yet it uses the terminology of pragmatism and Lockean liberalism to cloak fallacious underlying assumptions:

1. The fallacy of scale. Social democracy argues that bigger is better and that progress involves progressive governmentalization on ever larger scale. Since the 1950s and before, most economic progress has not required large scale, and economies of scale have not been fundamental to new economic and technological advance. Yet, social democracy subsidizes scale through financing mechanisms like the Federal Reserve Bank, political favoritism, direct grants and regulatory systems that freeze out small business.

2. The eschatological fallacy. Social democracy believes that society is headed toward a specific end or purpose related to its model of large scale production, namely enhancement of government control or socialism. The belief that the "problem of production has been solved" characterized the modernist period--until the Japanese showed American firms that they were clueless about production problems and that there will always be improvement in production. Moreover, the solutions to the problems of production require information, not scale. As well, large scale organizations are too rigid to adopt the steps needed to improve production.

3. The predictability fallacy. Social democracy believes that it can solve problems because rationality is the primary ingredient to problem solving. In fact, rationality is but one of several elements in problem solving. Because demand, technology and other conditions change, information specific to time and place is often more important to solving technological and market problems, as the Austrian economist Friedrich A. Hayek argued. Therefore, experts in large governmental bureaus are not only ill-equipped to solve problems, but are guaranteed to fail to grasp what the important problems are.

4. The infinite regress fallacy. Social democrats believe that if business is corrupt, all that is needed to correct corruption is a layer of regulation. But who is to guarantee that the regulators are less corrupt than the firm? Are regulators descended from a special race of especially honest men? Might not regulators develop economic interests in the industries that they regulate? And if so, do social democrats propose regulators of the regulators, and do they believe that this additional layer, or Congress itself, is somehow better equipped or motivated to regulate?

5. The social democratic invincibility fallacy. Social democrats imagine themselves, as Sumner points out, to be smarter, more moral and better equipped to solve problems than others. Few social democrats have solved problems competently. I can state this with assurance because few government programs work. The groupthink associated with participation in the social democratic movement is the social democratic movement's greatest obstacle to pragmatism. The readers of the New York Times imagine themselves "smarter" because they read the Times, and so on. This sort of egotistical delusion precludes intelligent thinking and guarantees a rigidity and closed mindedness among social democrats that ensures the failure of any and all of their ideas.

William Graham Sumner on Social Doctors

"The amateur social doctors are like amateur physicians--they always begin with the question of remedies, and they go at this without any diagnosis or any knowledge of the anatomy or physiology of society. They never have any doubt of the efficacy of their remedies. They never take account of any ulterior effects which may be apprehended from the remedy itself. It generally troubles them not a whit that their remedy implies a complete reconstruction of society, or even a reconstitution of human nature. Against all such social quackery the obvious injunction to the quacks is to mind their own business.

"The social doctors enjoy the satisfaction of feeling themselves to be more moral or more enlightened than their fellow-men. They are able to see what other men ought to do when the other men do not see it. An examination of the work of the social doctors, however, shows that they are only more ignorant and more presumptuous than other people. We have a great many social difficulties and hardships to contend with. Poverty, pain, disease, and misfortune surround our existence. We fight against them all the time. The individual is a centre of hopes, affections, desires and sufferings...But we have inherited a vast number of social ills which never came from Nature. They are the complicated products of all the tinkering, muddling and blundering of social doctors in the past. These products of social quackery are now buttressed by habit, fashion, prejudice, platitudinarian thinking, and new quackery in political economy and social science...the greatest reforms which could now be accomplished would consist in undoing the work of statesmen in the past and the greatest difficulty in the way of reform is to find out how to undo their work without injury to what is natural and sound."

---William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, Originally published in 1883.