Watchhttp://www.tenthamendmentcenter.com/2010/02/20/jefferson-vs-lincoln-america-must-choose/
Perhaps our most famous president of all Honest Abe, was as close a thing to a dictator we ever had, and ignored the Constitution when ever it was inconvenient to follow. No wonder the Washington elite who follow his example made his monument he biggest of them all.
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Jefferson received 41,330 votes to win the presidency.
*That* America is long, long gone.
Even the Progressive days are long gone. Wilson won the election of 1912 with 6.3 million votes.
Lincoln? 1.8M
Libertarians idealize a past that wasn't all that great back then and rather irrelevant now.
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The "choice" was made via our civil war. States' rights lost, and the all-powerful centralized government won. That was our 2nd. Revolution, and we've been in decline ever since. An interesting fact too about Mr. Lincoln; unlike Andrew Jackson, he favored a Central Bank his entire political career. Jackson finally won his battle against the Bank of the United States, and for the first and only time in our entire history, the U. S. government had zero debt. Maybe that has something to do with all the myth and propaganda surrounding Lincoln’s career and Jackson, on the other hand, a truly great American and President, is barely a footnote.
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Holy shit, the USA of 2010 is not the same as the USA of the 1800s?
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Kevin says
Right ... and the lessons of history mean nothing .... right again?? LOL
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elliemae's website
I'd venture to guess that any post from Ad hom with the words, "Amercia Must Choose" will largely be ignored.
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elliemae says
I'd venture to guess that any comment from ellie may will be largely devoid of any substance other than a good helping of ad hominem.
check that. I can prove it. See above. and below.
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RayAmerica says
They mean a lot of things -- when applied correctly and analyzed to find parallels with the current world. There are just far too many things that are different today to make a direct comparison to the times of either man relevant (and, hell, even comparing what Lincoln did to what Jefferson did is hard)
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Lincoln fought against the power of the individual states (actually a bunch of states)
Jefferson maintained that any state has the right to voluntarily join and voluntarily leave the "union"
the fact they lived at different times means just that they lived at different times.
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AdHominem says
I know you are, but what am I? Besides totally awesome, smart and topical. And informed.
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AdHominem says
We didn't have nuclear weapons, automobiles, or electricity.
Things aren't the same. It's pointless to compare.
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Kevin says
Technology, and larger population just means the stakes are higher.
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Technology, and larger population just means the stakes are higher.
The higher population is the key thing. Back in Jefferson's day, there was enough productive land for everyone, though that didn't stop horrible boom/bust cycles as land speculators pushed up the price of accessible land, only to have it all crash.
Once the land began being tied to cities with railroads, Lincoln's Homestead Act was something of a social relief valve for thirty or so years, until all the good land was homesteaded and the capitalist class began hoarding the limited money supply.
Jefferson's solution was an increasing land tax, something I'm sure you're fully behind now...
"Another means of silently lessening the inequality of [landed] property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions or property in geometrical progression as they rise." -- Thomas Jefferson
Also, the technology aspect is also important. Technology is capital!
The Progressive movement of the early 20th century did not arise from socialist insurrection but rather real problems with the laissez faire status quo of Gilded Age hyper-capitalism (a capitalism rather similar to China's industrialization 1990-2010).
Teddy Roosevelt's speech to his supporters in 1912 is a litany of liberalizations and complaints that seem common sense to rational people today (but out of phase with teabaggers and conservatives of the Taft school -- but of course, Taft, the sitting president, finished third in 1912).
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=607
I wish the National Progressive Party was still around today!
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5722/
Marx had an idea that Jefferson might have developed if their epochs had been reversed, the idea of the "alienation of labor".
His observations on this were on multiple levels, from the individual's depersonalization in the factory, to the desocialization between wage earners and wage payers, to the general disability of the wage earner to see the big picture of capitalism and visualize how he could become a capitalist himself.