#Liberas and dictators free
Lincoln also opposed free trade with a crude version of the labor theory of value, saying, "To secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government." In Abraham Lincoln, the party of protectionism and privilege found its hope of breaking the decades-old resistance to mercantilist schemes.
Bismarck would loyally serve the ideal of feudal and monarchical authoritarianism as the twin pillars of the Prussian state's self-declared destiny to unify a disunited Germany.Ībraham Lincoln would rise through the ranks of the pre-Republican Whig Party of Illinois, eventually securing unquestioned control over the state party machine, all the time advocating the mercantilist agenda of tariffs, subsidies to politically connected businesses, a central bank and paper money, and a strong executive.Īs Professor Thomas DiLorenzo shows in his book, The Real Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln was devoted in his unquestioning belief in the beneficial effects of protective tariffs, even once telling a reporter that although he didn't know why, he was sure that protectionist tariffs would make everything cheaper. Otto von Bismarck sprang from a long line of Prussian Junker landowners, and he identified with the Junker's disdain for the emerging industrial society in Germany, with its liberal ideas of individualism and opposition to feudal privilege and monarchical absolutism. And both Lincoln and Bismarck would found their power on the slave labor of conscript armies. The activities involved in centralizing power would necessarily involve similar means to that end-chiefly, war, dictatorship, and deception.īoth Lincoln and Bismarck began their careers laboring in their respective wildernesses in pursuit of their twin goals: the consolidation of their general federations into a centralized regime of privilege and the destruction of free trade and other classical liberal ideas. It shouldn't be surprising that the actions of two despots would closely parallel each other. Both Lincoln and Bismarck followed the course that Mises rightly named after Bismarck. Ludwig von Mises was born in 1881, when the Prussian autocrat Otto von Bismarck was at the height of his power, and in his book Planning for Freedom, Mises speaks of "the clash of two orthodoxies the Bismarck orthodoxy versus the Jefferson orthodoxy."Ībraham Lincoln is incorrectly remembered as a man in the Jeffersonian tradition and as the restorer of liberty, while Bismarck is generally seen as a ruthless dictator, eager to sacrifice men to his policy of deciding the future of his countrymen "by blood and iron."Ĭontrary to this view, both men-Abraham Lincoln and Otto von Bismarck-should be viewed as allied together in the common cause of destroying the principles of classical liberalism.
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