Tom DiLorenzo on Abraham Lincoln, US Authoritarianism and Manipulated History
Most historians generally know nothing at all about economics, but that doesn’t stop them from writing book after book on economic topics, including the economics of the Civil War. There are a lot of books out there in university libraries that contain the facts about Lincoln, but these facts rarely make it into the textbooks that American children use. Education is dominated by the state, after all, and the state only criticizes past politicians who were not sufficiently statist (like Warren Harding, for instance). Being an economist and a libertarian gives one a very different lens with which to look at this information. Historians simply don’t understand the importance of how the American political economy was transformed by the Lincoln regime, and most of them are rather buffoonish, excuse-making court historians when it comes to Lincoln who is, after all, the face and image of the American empire.