#neverliberal #nevermarxist
Seeing as how my article on Thomas Jefferson was ripped to shreds (by a couple of posters), I'm hoping I'll have more luck with this one, which features some fun facts on Teddy Roosevelt :--link removed by taxed -- we're not your research monkeys.Let me know what you guys think. My aim was to do something that wouldn't be seen as partisan/controversial. Teddy is one of my favorite presidents, and I can't seem to learn enough about the guy.
If you like Progressives, I can see why he would be a favorite.
I have a different take on Teddy and the trust issue.The first corporation to be busted was Standard Oil, owned by Rockefeller. Teddy was a Morgan man- Morgan helped get him the VP nod originally. As we know there has been a dynastic rivalry between the House of Morgan and the Rockefeller ambit, for generations. So Teddy used the court system to punish Standard Oil for political reasons. Standard was no monopolist and they had been expanding output and lowering prices, helping out the consumer, through efficiency enhancing acts, such as "vertical integration."There is also a line of argument pursued by Thomas Woods that Teddy ushered in the modern "imperial Presidency." Though a good argument can be made that Lincoln already laid that groundwork.For more on Teddy, check the link: http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=96To respond to Mountainshield's point... Corporations do want the state to protect their profits. That is certainly true. And anti-trust lawsuits are no exception to that rule. What these suits were in reality, aside from their public perception, was a carefully orchestrated attempt by special interests to seek protection form more efficient rivals. Anti-trust was not about protecting competition, rather it was about protecting competitors. For a detailed analysis of the arguments made during the early anti-trust suits, check out the following book.http://library.mises.org/books/Dominick%20Armentano/Antitrust%20The%20Case%20for%20Repeal.pdf
There is also a line of argument pursued by Thomas Woods that Teddy ushered in the modern "imperial Presidency." Though a good argument can be made that Lincoln already laid that groundwork.
Corporations do want the state to protect their profits. That is certainly true. And anti-trust lawsuits are no exception to that rule
Yeah I have been reading Daniel Yergin The Quest and I have to say that Standard Oil is a perfect example of how the free market is self regulating and to the benefit of the consumer.
It's incredibly difficult - and usually unfair - to judge historical figures for what happens hundreds of years after they did something. No sane person could deny that abolishing slavery - in and of itself - was a noble and glorious achievement. Unfortunately that eventually became transmogrified into the utterly insane and idiotic theological tenet that can only be coherently expressed as follows: "The only way to ensure individual freedom is to cede ever more power to a monolithic central authority."The pathologically stupid and monstrously evil people who proselytize that psychotic religion may yet succeed in their zealous quest to plunge the entire world into a dark age of universal subjugation. But that is most definitely NOT Abraham Lincoln's fault... any more than it's James Madison's fault that "Progressive" liberals have spent the past century systematically transforming the most succinct marvel of concision ever penned into a Bizarro World inverse of itself.I hate to seem overly-technical, but what corporations want is to protect is profits -- period.The term for people who want the GOVERNMENT to protect the profits of select corporations is "Fascist." And that applies equally whether those liberals are in boardrooms, in government office, or squatting in front of fire hydrants on Wall Street.
No need to judge historical figures for outcomes hundreds of years down the road. We can judge them on actions they undertook while in office. Lincoln's actions were that of a tyrant. No man has the right to compel others to maintain any association. That Lincoln was willing to go to any lengths, no matter how brutal and barbaric, to subjugate other humans, implies that he cannot believe in inalienable human freedom or self ownership. Indeed his actions imply that he felt himself within his rights to control the actions of many people, at the point of a gun, in ways too brutal for even the most sadistic slave master to consider. For slaves were capital goods bought for the purposes of earning a profit, and a dead slave does no work.
Further his actions as President ushered in a new precedent that subsequent President's would be empowered by. There is an inertia in political power. It expands but does not tend to contract. Robert Higgs has dubbed this the "ratchet effect."
Though in the context of this discussion I am not sure what is overly technical about such an idea. Indeed it is foundational to understanding the history of anti-trust.
Excellent points all, except that none of that means anything whatsoever unless you can explain how YOU would have abolished slavery in Lincoln's stead.
Slavery was absolutely vital to the existence of every civilization in human hisotry. But in America - the indisputable beacon of world freedom - it had finally outlived its necessity decades earlier. Unfortunately, the southern states dug in their heels and were absolutely adamant about the issue.I don't mean this at all facetiously. I would dearly love to know how that transition might have been accomplished in a way that would have avoided violence and - there is no way to over-emphasize this - the contemporaneously HYPOTHETICAL loss of future liberties.
I had to look that up. Thanks for wasting my time, btw. I PERSONALLY had been using that phrase to describe the same effect for at least a couple of decades before this dufus "coined" it.
You can take comfort in the fact that I'm only a very tiny bit annoyed by that. But it's safe to say that Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, were they alive to post here, would have a right to be infinitely more so.
What's "foundational" to the American anti-trust movement at the turn of the twentieth century is also foundational to a then-potentially viable economic theory that only LATER became a patently psychotic cult.
At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, it is at least theoretically possible that a not-completely-braindead individual might have imagined Communism to be a potentially viable economic theory.
As (literal) cottage industries were usurped by larger and larger assembly lines, it was fantasized that they would eventually reach an infinite economy of scale. Ergo (assuming the economist also lacked the capacity to imagine that the public's desire for an increased standard of living would also fail to expand with increased supply) this would in turn lead to a Worker's Paradise of infinite pleasure and leisure.Hindsight is twenty-twenty. If I had been a doctor in 1840, I would very much like to believe that my genetically superior brain would have seen phrenology (the study of bumps on the scalp) for what it was: a crazy, stupid fad. But I can't re-write all my memories sufficiently to be POSITIVE that I'd have recognized that fact, at that precise moment in history.And, by the same token, there is no way anyone alive today can know for certain he'd have seen Communism for all that it was at the turn at the twentieth century; back when conservative American politicians were warning the electorate: "Don't be swayed by the material benefits of Communism!"Don't get me wrong; I am by no means trying to imply that Abraham Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt were Gods. Or that they were smarter than the average person of their day. Or even that they were smarter than the average politician of their day....All I'm saying is: stop equating those those well-meaning but understandably-ignorant noble primitives with the braindead neohippies who STILL worship the crazy-ass death cult that Communism eventually unequivocally demonstrated itself to be.
If today's liberals had fixated upon and transformed Franz Joseph Gall's theory (congratulations; now you get to look that one up ) into a totalitarian nightmare, it would not be HIS fault.So let dead Communists lie. Try to limit your wrath to precisely where it is most unquestionably deserved: The younger a liberal is, the more obviously stupid he is... and the oldest ones still alive today are pretty Goddamned moronic. I don't claim to be absolutely positive about anything that happened more than a hundred years ago, but I very strongly suspect that James Madison, Abraham Lincoln. Teddy Roosevelt - and maybe even fucking FRANKLIN Roosevelt - would wholeheartedly agree with all of us about that.