An Interview with Thomas DiLorenzo

0:00I'm sitting here with Thomas DiLorenzo, a professor at Loyola College in Baltimore, and he's teaching at the Mises University on a variety of topics, but you took a short trip to New Orleans yesterday. Did you take another talk? Yes, I did. I spoke at a convention there, and I spoke about my forthcoming book, Lincoln Unmasked, What You're Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe, which is sort of a sequel to The Real Link in my earlier book. and so and since it was New Orleans sort of a not unexpectedly I had a standing ovation from 600 people including a few rebel yells in the in the back of the room so the anti-government attitudes are pretty intense these days in New Orleans well in New Orleans they certainly were I came back with a t-shirt that has big black letters of FEMA you know the Federal Emergency Management Association Association, the top, and then a long line of cuss words underneath that everyone so far I've showed it to has gotten a good laugh out of it.

1:03But I guess the one good thing that's come out of the hurricane down there is that people hate and despise FEMA and the federal government for what they've done. Not only that, but people I talked to fully understand that it was the Army Corps of Engineers screw up with the dyke system that caused the disaster. It wasn't the hurricane per se. Everyone I talked to knew this, and they all knew that the Corps of Engineers spun this for about six months. and then after the news died down there was they admitted it they admitted well that's yeah we goofed we didn't build a good enough system to protect the people from this hurricane and but that was our page 28 news by that point and they understood that I thought these really ordinary people they weren't scientists or academics or libertarians like us they were just ordinary working people I guess the message hasn't gotten out to the general population, but wasn't there some kind of, didn't FEMA, or was it the Army Corps of Engineers, that issued a report, actually, a big, it was a huge study.

2:13That it would not withstand a Category 5 hurricane? Yeah, I think I remember that. This is one after everything that came out and sort of assessed the government's response. I guess this is what government does, right? When there's a disaster, they hire, they assign a committee to kind of look into things. Yeah, they assign a committee. I remember reading this news article and it was an eye-opener because they did admit it was our fault, but I think the way in which they're going to use it, of course, is to say, well, therefore we need a bigger budget. We need more money because that's how government always operates. Failure is success. When you fail spectacularly like this, they probably will double or triple or quadruple their budget, just as though when NASA blows up a space shuttle, I think they literally did double NASA's budget the last time they did that, a big accident.

3:01Yeah, it's proof that government failures end up being proof that taxpayers are too stingy and aren't willing to cough up enough. Yeah, that's what I always tell my students, if you think about the incentives, if you're You're wondering why it is that government so-called services are so poor, well the incentives are completely backwards. The failure of success in government, in the private sector, if you serve consumers well, you're rewarded. It's just the opposite. Is there an in-between solution, somewhere between the privatization of all this public infrastructure and the current system, is there anything that, yeah, because people How likely is that? Being there yesterday, just picking up the local paper in New Orleans, the government bureaucrats and their contractors are still working feverishly day and night literally on these levies because we're entering the peak of the hurricane season right now this year. And so the government is gaining a big stronghold and taking over this rebuilding of the Levees.

4:36The Superdome was packed with people from all walks of life and they weren't academics, it wasn't an academic convention. They understood that at the Superdome, you remember seeing on television all these people crowded into the Superdome. They said there were thousands and thousands of automobiles parked around the Superdome that these people drove to the Superdome in. and so they could have left but my take on it is these are people who were so conditioned to being taken care of by the government. The government told them go to the Superdome and that's what they did and they didn't have the wherewithal a day earlier to say let's get out of here like ordinary people would have done but all these people who have been on generations of welfare are so used to being just told what to do and taken care of by somebody. They The Theory of Money and Credit

5:57I know that. It seems to be increasingly part of the culture of emergency in the US, where there's these little storm troopers, you know, sort of come out of nowhere. I mean, even around here, there was a case, I think last year, that there was a little bit of lightning and a thunderstorm or something like that, and we had one of those FEMA alarm systems that went off, and immediately everybody was held in wherever you were, all over town. Really? Couldn't go anywhere. In public libraries, you weren't allowed to leave? Well, we've become a nation of sheep, I guess, with all these years of statism we've been suffering under. And the post-9-11 era has sped this up, I think, a great deal. You just walk through the airports like I've done in the last week four or five times, and everybody's yelling.

6:45Even the private airline employees are yelling at you now on the airlines to do that.

7:49But no one else said anything. I think that was the obvious question. I mean, they're a business, and they discon... inconvenience their customers tremendously, you know, there were all sorts of business people on that thing, they were buzzing away on their cell phones, cussing, I can't, I'm going to miss this big meeting, and who knows how much money they lost because of that. And the issue was probably had something to do with the unions, that they didn't want to... they probably have a union contract, or they won't work before 7 a.m. or something like that, I would guess. I think it struck me that no one would have spoken up about that. I'm probably over the top regulations concerning the instruments on the panel. I guess if the FAA bureaucrat wasn't on the job at that hour, they couldn't have done it at 4 a.m. or 5 a.m.

8:37without the government's permission. It does seem that the culture has, the political culture, and just generally, things have really... 9-11 represented something like a turning point, didn't it? Yeah, I remember emailing, I recall emailing our good friend, Professor Ralph Rakow, the very, one very eloquent message of, we're screwed after 9-11, because he just, anyone who's ever read Robert Higgs's book, Crisis and Leviathan, would have anticipated exactly what the state was going to do. It was going to explode in terms of the building of bigger and new bureaucracies and taxes and rules and regulations and restrictions on our travel, and that's exactly what has happened. And we're no safer.

9:26To show you how naive I am, I've read the book, but after 9-11, I thought, well, that's what happens with our interventionist foreign policy. Maybe at long last somebody's going to see this and I will do something about it. Unfortunately, the voices that would articulate that correct argument are too few and not quite as powerful. That doesn't mean they always will be in that state, but as I've said in some of my other writings, as you know, Jeff, I've written books on such topics as tax-funded politics of how government writes checks to special interest groups that use the money then to lobby for bigger government. The government has the ability to drown out all of their voices if it wants to on an issue like this.

10:16Even though there are great reasons to believe that our foreign policy is the root cause of this, so far it's been drowned out by the terrorizing of the population, not by the terrorists, but by our own government. Just the other day here at Mises U and I ran back to my condo and turned on the television news. There was a map of the United States on the Fox News Channel and the lettering below it had about 30 stars on the different cities in the map all over the country that were blinking off and on and underneath it it said Hezbollah terror cells in America. And I looked at that and I'm thinking well if the government knows where these terror The question is, how do they know where the terrorist cells are exactly, that they can pinpoint them on a map? Why don't they go get them? Or if they do, if I was a terrorist and I saw that map, I'd get out of town. So it struck me that it had to be made up. How do they know there's terrorist cells in Dubuque, Iowa, in Seattle, Washington, and all that? And if they did know, why aren't they doing anything about it? And why would they reveal to the terrorists that they know where they are? It doesn't make any sense at all. And so the only thing that makes sense is they're trying to use the current war in Lebanon

11:30to stir up more fear in the minds of Americans so they can grab more power over us because that map was just totally stupid. It's inconceivable that that was true. The same thing with it. You remember all the color-coded nonsense where on Thursday would be a red alert and probably a yellow alert. Then they changed it and confused everybody. The assumption is somehow the government is privy to special kinds of information and special plans that are going to secure us that other people don't have. Yes, we're from the government and we're here to help you.

12:21As long as enough people believe in that, they'll continue to control us. What you just said reminds me of something our old friend Yuri Maltsev said when I first met him. He came here from Russia in the late 80s and I started asking him questions about what are some of the biggest differences between life in the Soviet Union where he grew up until middle age and life in America now that you've been here a couple of years. He said he couldn't believe how everyone believes just about everything the government says here. Whereas in the Soviet Union, no one believed anything the politicians said over there for his entire life. They just went along with it because there was nothing they could do about it. But as long as we have this childish attitude that our parents are in Washington D.C., no matter how old we are, they'll keep controlling and abusing us like that.

13:14How much of a contribution do you think you've made to helping a broad sector of the public to rethink the Lincoln question? Well, I don't have any scientific measurement. I know I've sold a lot of books. My book is being used at quite a few universities. Even if it's being used as a foil where a professor will use it and then criticize it all semester, they're still making the students read the book. and you know everywhere I go I've given lots of speeches all over the country to all kinds of groups mostly student groups I've had dozens of invitations to go to universities and they always come for the students never from the from the professors because it's a little too politically incorrect I guess but the students love it they love having someone someone come on campus and and say things that they know will some of their professors will disagree with In my next book, Lincoln Unmasked, the final chapter is called Contra the Lincoln Cult.

14:23It's basically about a number of authors who are not professional Lincoln scholars, but who have nevertheless written books either about Lincoln or part of a book about Lincoln that basically agree with my interpretation of the whole thing, and one of them is James Webb, the former U.S. Navy secretary, who wrote a book on the history of the Scots-Irish in America, and he has a big section since the Scots-Irish overwhelmingly settled in the South and were very heavily represented in the Confederate Army in what I call the war to prevent southern independence. He provides some pretty good arguments. There's a man Stephen Weisman, Lincoln's Wrath, Lincoln's Crackdown and Demolition of Civil Liberties The History of Slavery in New York The Theory of Money and Credit

16:28What I think is really great about your method here is that you're able to write commercially successful books, which is not easy, but also make them rigorous from a scholarly point of view. I mean, rigorously persuasive, that's not easy, there's not many people who can manage that. I've been thinking of that my whole life pretty much. When I was a college student, I thought Milton Friedman and James Buchanan were among my best, my sort of role models as far as writers because I thought they both had really good techniques for explaining things and in addition to being eventually Nobel Prize winning economists and so even as a young student I worked hard at trying to imitate some of the better writing styles of some of the economists

17:57How did you manage that? Well, the real Lincoln actually, I had published an article in The Independent Review called The Great Centralizer. And then I looked at that article and I said, I can turn this into a book. I'm going to do more research and I just took each section of that article and expanded my research and my writing. And I did this over a summer and it was the end of the summer and I was pretty much done. I had a manuscript there and I got a phone call from a publisher from a publishing company that was affiliated with Random House who said I read your article in the Independent Review, would you consider turning this into a book? And I said yes I would. In fact I just did that. So I sent them that and they published it and it sold very well as you know it created a big controversy.

18:49and there have even been magazine articles about my current publisher Crown Forum that I have someone sent me about the publishing business that actually points to this book as one of the early successes of this whole enterprise where the Random House decided to devote a few resources to publishing conservative books they call them conservative books and they highlighted mine as one of the first successes they had The big seller of my publisher is Ann Coulter. Her latest book is also published by them.

19:34And God bless Ann, she sold half a million copies in about a week, so maybe I can ask for a bigger advance next time, now that I know they're loaded. But that's how I got connected with this division of Random House, Crown Forum, and they've published my Capitalism book, How Capitalism Saved America, and I just sent them a proposal for another book that they said, we like it, and we'll get back to you shortly about details. Do you, but this is another proposal? They're publishing my third, my second Lincoln book, so they've published two of them. They've published The Real Lincoln, How Capitalism Saved America, and then this one, Lincoln The proposal I sent them is a book called Hamilton's Curse, and the subtitle I'm still working on is something like Why Jefferson's Arch-Enemy Disavowed the American Revolution.

20:43The title comes from John Steele Gordon's book called Hamilton's Blessing, where he claims he argues that the public debt has been a blessing to America. I'm looking much closer at Hamilton in terms of his economic ideas, and I think he is the main source of so many bad ideas that have come to fruition in America. He was a champion of corporate welfare, central banking, business and politics being linked, protectionism, the idea that there are implied powers in the Constitution that aren't actually written down, because that was Hamilton's idea that Justice John Marshall ran with and has plagued us ever since.

21:30He was a big tax increaser, he championed public debt, and so as a free market economist, You can't see a good economic idea anywhere in Hamilton, but of course America has been one big battle between the philosophies of Hamilton and Jefferson, and in recent years there have been quite a few big books written that lionize Hamilton and demonize Jefferson. And so I argue to my publishers in my proposal that I think I'm uniquely qualified to do something like this, because the only historian who has ever written about Hamilton who claims And Mises' economic expertise is Forest MacDonald. And he's a historian. He's not an economist. And he does have more of an economic background than most historians. But still, not very good. He gets a lot of Hamilton's economics wrong.

22:17He's a champion of Hamilton. He thinks he's great. But Hamilton's economic ideas were universally terrible from my perspective. And so, I'm proposing to... sort of each chapter after I get through the introductory material will be... Here's what went on during Hamilton's day with his big debate with Jefferson or whoever over these issues. And then I want to trace through in the same kind of language that I use in my other books, how what happened once we did get Hamiltonian central banking, what has been the record of central banking? And then I'm going to make a case against central banking, hopefully in a readable form. And then his protectionism, he was sort of the champion of protectionism. How has America fared over the years with that?

23:02It's an interesting strain of thought, because you did the same thing, of course, with the whole of your studies of Henry Clay and the Lincoln period. There is a tie. There was the mercantilists in America, the leaders of the mercantilism in America, historically were Hamilton, then Clay, then Lincoln, and then the Republican Party in general in the late 19th century, and then Roosevelt when FDR came around, the New Deal was the neo-mercantilism with all the wage codes that propped up prices and things like that were his version of mercantilism. But Hamilton remains the patron saint of all this, but I don't think the average American has any understanding of this.

23:47He might know there was a big debate between Hamilton and Jefferson, but I think it has a lot more economic meaning. Has your opinion of the Federalist Papers changed at all as you've done your studies? Yeah, actually one of the things I'm planning on getting into in this book, Hamilton's Curse, is looking at how the way I've come to see it is that the Constitution was a coup against The Jeffersonians really, and the limited government contingent among the founding fathers, as Albert J. Knox said in his work, he said it was a bloodless coup that opened the door to centralized governmental power, especially giving the central government the power to tax.

24:44That was sort of the beginning of the end of liberty in America in my view. I guess it's all relative. Compared to what we've got today, if you were to enforce the Constitution, we would be better off in terms of freedom and prosperity, but we would be even better off yet if we had never had the Constitution and stuck with the Articles of Confederation and had a loose confederation and not a centralized state. and so I have changed my mind a bit about that, with all my work on Lincoln and that I think what happened in America now is that the Constitution was a coup d'etat that the nationalists succeeded with and they made all kinds of promises that this Constitution would limit government, don't worry about it, but then they worked diligently to undermine the limits on government John Marshall bears a lot of the blame for that, for talking about implied powers of the Constitution, not real powers, for example.

25:45And then I think the war between the states was the final end of that coup d'etat, where we finally cemented into place, at gunpoint, what the nationalists always wanted. and then from then on they rewrote the history and we celebrate nationalism and patriotism and militarism which is what these people and their political ancestors were always about in my view. Did you go to any 4th of July celebrations this year? No, I didn't go to any. Unfortunately I live in downtown Baltimore and they blew off the fireworks right in front of where I lived So my dog was very frightened by them, but she recovered, and now I never say the Pledge of Allegiance because I know it was written by a late 19th century socialist whose idea was to indoctrinate into school children obedience to the state, and so I'll stand up and smile, but I won't put my hand on my heart and say the Pledge of Allegiance.

26:50The independence day idea is a wonderful one. It's amazing how that whole holiday has been converted into the celebration of the military. I know the meaning of Independence Day. It was our declaration of secession from the British Empire. But you're right, it's been turned into one big militaristic state-worshipping event. You turn on the television in the evening, on July 4th, and you'll see down at the mall in Washington, D.C.

27:35with all the military people and the cannons and all that. A Canadian friend of mine, a very pretty song is O Canada. As far as anthems goes, I like O Canada. And a Canadian friend of mine once remarked, why is America bombs bursting in air? Why is everything so militaristic and warlike in your anthems compared to O Canada? That's our culture. It's been our culture for quite a long time, I guess. The problem is that many people assume that the purpose of the American Revolution is to make us ruled by the Constitution instead of a king. That's not understanding that there is a period of time that passes between the Revolution and...

28:24Yes, that's right. And you can't rely on the government schools to teach you that. The whole principle of divided sovereignty, which is what the founders understood, that they set up this system whereby if this central government was to be controlled by the people, the only possible hope for that would be if the people could organize politically at their local or community level or state level to exert control over this central state. It turns out that was not effective, and I argue that the war of 1861 to 1865 was fought to destroy that once and for all, the ability of the people to be the masters rather than the servants of their central government.

29:12That's the real purpose of the war, and it was accomplished, too. The final nail in the coffin of that was the income tax in 1913, along with the Fed that One of the things I really admire about the way you've handled all of this since your first book on Lincoln came out is you've been the source of enormous controversy and many controversies stirred up in all kinds of circles over the book and yet you stayed on topic. The Theory of Money and Credit

31:21Foundations, and of course Carnegie and Ford have been criticized by conservatives for decades as being tools of the left wing. They're also funders of Harry Jaffa's career, who's the preeminent Lincoln idolater as I call them. And so people like that, with that sort of financial support, aren't used to criticism because they have the ability actually to finance,

32:15You make it seem easy, but it's very difficult, and a scholar with less maturity and less courage than you would have collapsed under the pressure. Well, thanks for the compliment, but that's the way I've always been. And you're right, most people are too intimidated. That's why, you know, if you look at all the people who call themselves libertarians and who write on issues related to this history, economic history, very, very few will even touch this topic, in my opinion of why that is, is that their first and foremost goal is to be acceptable to the mainstream. In academe, that means left-wingers. But I don't care about that.

33:05I look at people like Murray Rothbard as my inspiration, and Ludwig von Mises who pursued truth and weren't so interested in how their socialist colleagues will look at them, or whether or not they can get these people to write blurbs for their next book. I'm not concerned about that. I don't care if James McPherson doesn't write a blurb for my next book. Jeffrey Hummel may care, but I don't care about that sort of thing. You have a

34:01and wrote about states, rights, federalism. Felix Morley, his book, Freedom and Federalism, is a great little book on this, but you don't see anything like that coming out of any of the more visible libertarian think tanks or writers anymore, apart from me. You're doing your part to bring it back and we're grateful to you for teaching this week at the Mises U where you're mostly talking about economics, not about history. That's right. To me, this is Mecca. I enjoy coming to Mecca, even though it's a hassle going through those transportation security aircrafts at the Atlanta airport. It's worth coming to Mecca. Mecca on the Chattahoochee, maybe we can call it someday. Well, thank you very much for visiting with us today. My pleasure.