{"id":1966,"date":"2014-02-08T21:13:33","date_gmt":"2014-02-08T21:13:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/?p=1966"},"modified":"2014-02-08T21:15:27","modified_gmt":"2014-02-08T21:15:27","slug":"david-brooks-whigs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/blog\/2014\/02\/david-brooks-whigs\/","title":{"rendered":"David Brooks, The Whigs, and Corporate Welfare – Article by Thomas J. DiLorenzo"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/div>\n
Thomas J. DiLorenzo
\n<\/big><\/big><\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n
February 8, 2014<\/span>
\n<\/big><\/div>\n
Recommend this page<\/a>.<\/strong><\/div>\n

******************************<\/p>\n

In a January 30 column David Brooks, the house neoconservative of the New York Times<\/em>, urged Obama to ignore both his socialist\/egalitarian base and the \u201cconservative tradition that believes in limiting government to enhance freedom.\u201d Obama already has nothing but hateful contempt for the latter tradition and needs no convincing by a right-wing statist like David Brooks.<\/p>\n

The president should also abandon his life-long infatuation with and devotion to socialism as well, advises David Brooks. In its place he should pursue an agenda of crony capitalism disguised as a \u201csocial mobility agenda\u201d with the help of professional propagandists and perverters of American history such as Brooks and his fellow neoconservatives. Of course, Brooks doesn\u2019t use these less-than-flattering words to describe his Machiavellian agenda. He talks of \u201ca third ancient tradition\u201d in American history, namely, \u201cthe Whig tradition, which begins with people like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln.\u201d<\/p>\n

Either Brooks knows nothing at all, whatsoever, about the Whig Party tradition in American history, or he is lying through his teeth about it. For he describes it as having been devoted to \u201cusing the power of government to give marginalized Americans the tools to compete in a capitalist economy.\u201d The Whigs, says Brooks, \u201cfought against the divisive populist Jacksonians\u201d who supposedly sought to \u201cpit classes against each other.\u201d Every bit of this is exactly the opposite of the truth. The Whigs were the party of crony capitalism, of government of plutocracy, by the plutocracy, for the plutocracy. That is why so many historians have marveled over how a man like Abe Lincoln, who grew up so poor, would become the political water carrier for the Northeastern moneyed elite in American politics.<\/p>\n

The most divisive economic issue in American politics during the heyday of the Whig Party (1832\u20131852) was the battle over free trade versus protectionism. If the Whigs stood for anything, they stood for corporate welfare in the form of high protectionist tariffs that would plunder the masses for the benefit of the few. This meant, for the most part, plundering Southern farmers more than anyone for the benefit of Northern manufacturers who would be protected from international competition by the high tariffs. As John C. Calhoun once said, what \u201cprotectionism\u201d protects the public from is low prices. Next to slavery, protectionism was the biggest assault on property rights in America during the first half of the nineteenth century. The Whigs did not believe in \u201csacred\u201d property rights, as Brooks foolishly writes. Their entire political agenda was based on the government-enforced attenuation of property rights <\/em>for the benefit of the wealthy and politically-connected.<\/p>\n

Next to political plunder through protectionism, the Whigs stood for the worst sort of crony capitalism in the form of needless corporate welfare for road-, canal-, and railroad-building corporations. This was euphemistically called \u201cinternal improvement subsidies\u201d at the time. Private capital markets financed thousands of miles of private roads during the first decades of the nineteenth century. As of 1800 there were 69 privately-financed road-building companies in America that would build more than 400 private roads over the next 40 years, as economist Daniel Klein has documented. The great railroad entrepreneur James J. Hill also proved that government subsidies were not needed to build a transcontinental railroad as he and his investors and business partners built and managed the Great Northern Railroad without a dime of government subsidy, not even \u201cland grants.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the Whigs did get their way and conned state government into funding \u201cinternal improvement subsidies\u201d, it was an unmitigated financial disaster. Very few, if any, projects were ever finished; taxpayers were stuck with enormous government debts to pay off; much of the money was simply stolen; and by 1860 every state except for Massachusetts had amended its constitution to prohibit the use of tax dollars for corporations with which to do anything, according to economic historian Carter Goodrich.<\/p>\n

Edgar Lee Masters, the famous 1930s-era poet, playwright (author of The Spoon River Anthology<\/em>), and law partner of Clarence Darrow, perfectly described the Whig Party on page 27 of his book, Lincoln the Man<\/em><\/a>. Describing the leader of the Whigs, Henry Clay, Masters wrote:<\/p>\n

Clay was the champion of 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. … He was the beloved son [figuratively speaking] of Alexander Hamilton with his corrupt funding schemes, his superstitions concerning the advantage of a public debt, and a people taxed to make profits for enterprises that cannot stand alone. His example and doctrines led to the creation of a party that had no platform to announce, because its principles were plunder and nothing else.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is exactly correct, and exactly the opposite of what David Brooks wants his New York Times<\/em> audience to believe. Clay\u2019s agenda, which Alexander Hamilton originally labeled \u201cThe American System,\u201d was really an Americanized version of the corrupt mercantilist system the American founders had fought a revolution against. The Hamilton\/Clay\/Lincoln \u201cAmerican System\u201d included protectionism, corporate welfare, and a central bank to dispense even more corporate welfare subsidies to politically-connected businesses. It was a recipe for political power based on using taxpayer dollars to line the pockets of the (mostly Northern state) business plutocracy at the expense of the general public. Some things never change in a democracy.<\/p>\n

It is equally outrageous for Brooks to claim that the Jacksonians were \u201cdivisive\u201d and wanted to \u201cpit classes against each other.\u201d This was the function of David Brooks\u2019s beloved Whigs, who were simply an early version of the neoconservatives; it was the libertarian Jacksonians who opposed politicized divisiveness<\/em> and the pitting of classes against each other. This is exemplified in President Andrew Jackson\u2019s famous veto of the re-chartering of the Second Bank of the United States, a precursor of the Fed.<\/p>\n

The Whigs championed a central bank. The Bank of the United States (BUS) even paid both of Brooks\u2019s heroes, Clay and Webster, many thousands of dollars as bribery money to promote the continuation of the bank despite the fact that it was well known that the BUS had corrupted politics and generated boom-and-bust cycles. In vetoing the re-chartering of the BUS (which was not overturned), Jackson wrote:<\/p>\n

It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. … In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by the law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society \u2014 the farmers, mechanics and laborers \u2014 who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government. … In the act before me [the bill to re-charter the BUS] there seems to be a wide and unnecessary departure from these just principles.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Neither Jackson nor the Jacksonians were \u201cperfect\u201d libertarians, but by their motto of \u201cequal rights\u201d they meant equality under the law and opposition to the use of the state to dispense \u201cexclusive privileges\u201d and special favors to special interests. They stood for exactly the opposite of what David Brooks claims they stood for, in other words.<\/p>\n

Brooks\u2019s commentary turns to slapstick humor at one point when he claims that the Whigs, who were, after all, politicians, were somehow \u201cfamily-oriented in their moral and social attitudes.\u201d (I assume that he threw this into his article to further dupe the \u201cevangelical Christian\u201d base of the Republican Party into accepting his thesis). The leader of the Whigs, the slave-owning Kentucky hemp plantation patriarch Henry Clay, was indeed \u201cfamily oriented\u201d in that he had 11 children. But he was also a notorious gambler who rang up $40,000 in personal debt in the 1820s<\/em> and was famous for staying out late carousing and dancing with women other than his wife while he was in Washington and the wife was back home in Kentucky, according to several biographies.<\/p>\n

Armed with this absurdly false history of American politics, Brooks argues for an explosion of governmental central planning by Obama during the rest of his term. He wants Obama to employ \u201csocial entrepreneurs\u201d to fundamentally transform American society by \u201cimproving family patterns,\u201d expanding early childhood education, \u201cstructuring neighborhoods,\u201d paying \u201cyoung men wage subsidies so they are worth marrying,\u201d training \u201cmiddle-aged workers\u201d for jobs, and generally micromanaging everyone\u2019s life from cradle to grave. In his words, government should promote \u201c[social] mobility issues from the beginning to the end of the lifespan.\u201d<\/p>\n

Something very much like this has been tried before. It was called totalitarian socialism, and it failed miserably.<\/p>\n

Thomas DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola University Maryland and a member of the senior faculty of the Mises Institute.<\/b><\/p>\n

He is the author of The Real Lincoln<\/a>; Lincoln Unmasked<\/a>; How Capitalism Saved America<\/a><\/i>; and Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson\u2019s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution \u2014 And What It Means for Americans Today<\/a><\/i>. Send him mail<\/a>.<\/b><\/p>\n

This article was published on Mises.org<\/a> and is reprinted pursuant to a Creative Commons Attribution License.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thomas J. DiLorenzo February 8, 2014 Recommend this page. ****************************** In a January 30 column David Brooks, the house neoconservative of the New York Times, urged Obama to ignore both his socialist\/egalitarian base and the \u201cconservative tradition that believes in limiting government to enhance freedom.\u201d Obama already has nothing but hateful contempt for the latter tradition and needs no convincing by a right-wing statist like David Brooks. The president should also abandon his life-long infatuation with and devotion to socialism…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2828,1512,76,1007,2827,2172,2826,2823,2822,18,84,2824,59,1188,977,2829,962,2821,25,2825],"class_list":["post-1966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","tag-alexander-hamilton","tag-andrew-jackson","tag-barack-obama","tag-central-bank","tag-corporate-welfare","tag-crony-capitalism","tag-cronyism","tag-daniel-webster","tag-david-brooks","tag-economy","tag-freedom","tag-henry-clay","tag-liberty","tag-protectionism","tag-railroad","tag-second-bank-of-the-united-states","tag-subsidies","tag-thomas-j-dilorenzo","tag-united-states","tag-whigs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1966"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1969,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1966\/revisions\/1969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}