DiLorenzo, Th

see Lichter

NO MERRI

MINOR ROLE? IN CASH FOR COMMENTS

th dilorenzo at von mises inst:airbag murders of smaller cars; z28 305hp camaro w/ cigar PO's petty tyrant and bizbody 62 strat ignor

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HNN

[1]The rest of this article is based on the Abbeville essay. Thus I do not have to buy the "book" by sending Amazon $5.38, some of which would trickle down to Abbeville and Wilson. Donald Livingston, a philosophy professor retired from Emory, operates the Abbeville Institute from his house. Besides Wilson, its other marquee member is Thomas DiLorenzo, the notorious anti-Lincoln writer.

[2]See "Getting Even the Numbers Wrong" in Loewen, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong, for a critique of this claim that overwhelming numbers caused the Confederate defeat.

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https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/07/thomas-dilorenzo/latest-progressive-smearbook/

Review: Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean, New York: Viking Press, 2017, 334 pp.

The primary theme of Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean, a Duke University history professor, is that participation in American democracy by conservatives or libertarians threatens the destruction of American democracy by imposing restraints on the unlimited growth of government. She claims to have only realized this dire threat in “the early 2010s” when “something extraordi-narily troubling had somehow entered American politics” (p. xv). Rather than the usual “bipartisan” support for the never-ending growth of government by both parties, a few “actions” of a few Republican governors and congressmen “seemed intended in one way or another to reduce the authority and reach of government….”

To Nancy MacLean this was “a fire bell in the night,” to borrow a phrase from Thomas Jefferson.

The alarming things that were so disturbing to MacLean were the actions of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker attempting to save his state from bankruptcy by restraining the political clout of teachers’ unions and other public employee unions; New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s criticisms of the teachers’ unions in his state; opposition to proposals to allow voter registration without showing proper I.D.; and the existence of articulate arguments in opposition to more socialist central planning of health care (a.k.a. “Obamacare”).

Everything seemed to be going swimmingly, with the most far-left ideologue in history occupying the White House, and Democrat Party dominance of Congress, and then all of this happens. Leftists like Nancy MacLean claim to have been blindsided by political opposition that they thought had been completely neutered. So left-wing academics, armed with their generous government and (left-wing) foundation grants, immediately “tried to get a better handle on what exactly was driving this sortie from the right.” This sudden opposition to the practice of effectively granting unlimited powers to raise taxes to public employee unions, and critiques of socialized medicine, is un-American, un-democratic, and a mortal threat to the American way of life, she claims.

There’s no need to panic, however, for MacLean claims to have discovered the root of the problem. Other leftist academics have attempted to uncover some kind of secret and sinister “master plan” to transform America into the dreaded (by the Nancy MacLeans of the world) free society by investigating the writings of Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and F.A. Hayek, she says. But with no avail. “[S]uch inquiries ran aground, because none of the usual suspects had sired this campaign” (p. xvii). “The missing piece of the puzzle,” she victoriously announces, “was James McGill Buchanan” and the Public Choice school of economics(p. xvii). This, she claims, is “the true origin story of today’s well-heeled radical right.” Without Buchanan and public choice economics, the “far right” would be “incapable of doing serious damage to American society” (p. xvii).

The mortal threat to MacLean’s cherished goal of the relentless push toward unlimited government (i.e.,totalitarian socialism) that the public choice school supposedly poses is that it has taught a great many people a great deal about how government actually works. Once they understand the process, it then becomes possible to propose changes to the process—or to the constitutional rules of the game—that could re-impose founding-father-style consti-tutional limits on the growth of government. All those years of Hamiltonian manipulation of “the living constitution” by leftist government lawyers in black robes could conceivably be reversed!

Indeed, Buchanan himself often said that public choice was essentially a rewriting of much of the writings of men like James

Madison and Jefferson in the language of modern public choice economics (it was Jefferson who said that “the natural tendency of things is for government to gain ground and for liberty to yield”; and that government needed to be “bound by the chains of the Constitution”). He also was fond of saying that “no one could be a socialist” if they understood public choice theory. Perhaps Nancy MacLean is on to something here.

:{:{In Nancy MacLean’s mind, there’s nothing wrong with America’s government establishment employing vast resources educating people how to use the levers and processes of government to expand its size, scope, powers, and budgets. This is accomplished today with the help of the vast university system which has become one giant taxpayer-financed think tank for statism with only a handful of exceptions; through a “mainstream media” that seems every bit as propagandistic as Pravda was during the Cold War; hundreds of thousands of government bureaucrats at all levels of government, every one of which is a propagandist/lobbyist for bigger government; }:

a K-12 school system that is thoroughly embedded with leftist political correctness; huge armies of political consultants, lobbyists, and paid propagandists; a popular culture that endlessly repeats anti-capitalist, anti-libertarian, and pro-statist themes; and thousands of government-funded nonprofit organizations, from the AARP to the Wilderness Society, that promote more interven-tionism and less freedom. On top of that are private foundations like Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller that have showered leftist academics with foundation grants for decades, not to mention the contributions of socialistic billionaires like George Soros, Ted Turner, and Bill Gates. For years, the Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C. published an annual study entitled Patterns of Corporate Philanthropythat documented that for every $1corporatefoundations gave to a conservative or libertarian organization, between $2 and $3 was given to a left-of-center group.}:

All of this is apparently a proper if not essential part of American democracy, but not the writings of James Buchanan and other public choice scholars, and certainly not conservative or liber-tarian foundations that would financially support such research and writing, even if their multi-million dollar donations are a mere pittance compared to the funding of the Left. Hence the purpose of Democracy in Chains is to discredit and even defame Buchanan, the public choice school, and especially wealthy conservative or libertarian philanthropists like Charles Koch who have funded such research and education. The bulk of the book is a relentless critique, sometimes bordering on libel and slander, of James Buchanan and Charles Koch, the bogeyman of the American Left.

MacLean learned a great deal about Buchanan by spending what must have been weeks, or months, going through all of his personal files in “Buchanan House” on the George Mason University campus. (When James Buchanan and his Public Choice Center moved from Virginia Polytechnic Institute to George Mason University in the mid 1980s the old president’s house was allocated to Buchanan as his office and was named “Buchanan House”).

MacLean boasts of how Buchanan’s intellectual heirs at George Mason left the door to Buchanan House unlocked so that someone like herself could rifle through all of the Nobel laureate’s private papers and files and use them to write a book that attempts to defame him. (She does call him a genius, but an “evil” genius).

The book is also an attack on libertarianism in general, as MacLean cherry picks quotations here and there from various libertarian-oriented writers, usually out of context, in order to critique and ridicule them. Oddly, there is only one mention of the most famous (non-academic) libertarian in the world, Ron Paul. MacLean mentions in passing on page 144 that, in the late 1970s, Ron Paul once voiced approval of a Reason Foundation proposal for city governments to put city services up for competitive bidding.

MacLean’s critique begins with a chapter about John C. Calhoun, of all people, who is not even cited a single time in Buchanan’s magnum opus (with Gordon Tullock), The Calculus of Consent. I never heard Buchanan mention Calhoun when I took his Ph.D.-level Public Finance course at VPI in the fall of 1977, or when I was a colleague of his for a few years at George Mason University in the 1980s. If he mentioned Calhoun in any of his writings, I am not aware of it. Neither is Nancy MacLean, apparently, for she does not present a single footnote to make the point that Buchanan was somehow following in Calhoun’s footsteps.

Nevertheless, Calhoun did write in the same philosophical spirit as Madison and other founders, and MacLean quotes Murray Rothbard (p. 2) to that effect. Buchanan did consider much of public choice theory to be derived from the kind of thinking possessed by the framers of the Constitution. Her discussion of Calhoun, however, is often distorted, just plain incorrect, and even cartoonish. For example, she claims that the only people in Calhoun’s South Carolina who would have been harmed by the 1828 Tariff of Abominations, which imposed an extortionate, 45 percent average tariff rate on imports, were wealthy plantation owners. The man who was supposedly Buchanan’s intellectual inspiration, she is saying, was a mere apologist for slave owners.

Such talk is simply a joke, for high tariffs on woolen blankets (100 percent), shoes, farm tools, leather goods, and myriad other consumer products negatively affected the entire population. Moreover, the Tariff of Abominations was a deeply regressive tax that imposed a harsher burden on the lower-income people whom MacLean, as a card-carrying leftist, claims to be championing.

MacLean is also factually wrong when she calls South Carolina’s opposition to the Tariff of Abominations “the first regionwide tax rebellion in U.S. history” (p. 6). The Pennsylvania Whiskey Rebellion (1791) and Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts (1786) occurred decades earlier. The American Revolution itself was in part a tax rebellion (“Taxation Without Representation!”). Did the American colonists fight a revolution so that they could maintain the system of slavery that the king of England had imposed on them? This is what MacLean’s logic, such as it is, would suggest.

These facts illustrate another falsehood in the book, namely, MacLean’s assertion that such tax protests “did not arise where slavery was absent” (p. 7). Yes, they did, and they were led mostly by yeoman farmers in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts who protested the imposition of national whiskey and property taxes.

MacLean’s apparent strategy here is to falsify history by insisting that all early-American tax protests occurred only to “protect slavery” for the wealthy “propertied class.” She quotes another leftist historian who wrote incorrectly that “the anti-government rhetoric that continues to saturate our political life is rooted in [support for] slavery rather than liberty” (p. 7). This would imply that all of the anti-government rhetoric of the founders, including Jefferson’s “train of abuses” in the Declaration of Independence, the writings of Thomas Paine, and much else was all designed only to “support slavery.” What nonsense.

She then makes numerous analogies to today’s libertarian intel-lectual critics of Big Government, arguing that they of course are not slavery defenders, but their motives are not much better—they are merely paid intellectual prostitutes defending the super-rich. The academic recipients of multi-million-dollar government or (left-wing) foundation grants, on the other hand, are assumed to be as morally pure and objectively honest as the driven snow.

Like all radical socialists, MacLean is a harsh, sneering critic of private property, following in the footsteps of Marx and Engels who called for the “ABOLITION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY” in The Communist Manifesto. She repeats her mantra in several chapters that libertarian defenders of property rights are really only defending the rights of perhaps the top one-half of one percent of income earners—the wealthiest of the wealthiest. Not even the “one-percenters,” she says, but the one-half-of-one-percenters. Who needs private property if only the wealthiest of the wealthy, who became wealthy in the first place by exploiting the rest of us, benefit from it?

That was supposedly true in Calhoun’s day, as it is today, she insists. She cites Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, and Friedman as though she has read their writings on property rights, but she either hasn’t or chose to ignore them. Mises was especially clear when he wrote in The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth(p. 67) that “Private property creates for the individual a sphere in which he is free of the state. It sets limits to the operation of the authoritarian will…. It thus becomes the basis of all those activities that are free from violent interference on the part of the state. It is the soil in which the seeds of freedom are nurtured and in which the autonomy of the individual and… material progress are rooted.” Secure property rights are a prerequisite for market exchange, market prices, the division of labor, and the human civilization created thereby.

Like other advocates of unlimited powers of the central state, MacLean also falsifies the history of nullification and interpo-sition by asserting that the idea began with Calhoun, and was only meant to defend slavery. But as Tom Woods (2010) shows in his book, Nullification, the American colonists were the first nullifiers. Jefferson and Madison then adopted the concept in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 that nullified the outlawing of free political speech through the Sedition Act that was being enforced by the Hamiltonian Federalist Party. Northern states nullified the Fugitive Slave Act, and Ohio nullified the chartering of branches of the Bank of the United States within its borders. New Englanders cited Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolve to justify nullifying President Jefferson’s trade embargo and to decline participation in the War of 1812.

McLean also falsely asserts that Calhoun was the first to talk of two conflicted classes in terms of net taxpayers (producers) and net tax consumers. This, too, was not original with Calhoun, but was introduced to American political philosophy by Jefferson and others who were familiar with the writings of the French “Industrialist School” of such writers as Augustin Theiry, Charles Comte, Charles Donoyer, Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Benjamin Constant, and Jean-Baptiste Say (Raico, 2006). Nor was Calhoun the lone American writing about what is known as libertarian class analysis; William Leggett, the owner and editor of the NewYork Postduring Calhoun’s time and a well-known abolitionist, was a prolific libertarian writer who also wrote of the injustice of empowering “net tax consumers” to plunder their fellow citizens.

MacLean really did her homework after spending all that time in Buchanan House, for a good portion of the book is a biographical sketch of James Buchanan, beginning with his birth in Gun, Tennessee in 1919. She briefly discusses his intellectual exodus from Middle Tennessee State Teachers College (triple major in English, Economics, and Mathematics), his time on the staff of Admiral Nimitz during World War II, the University of Tennessee (Master’s degree in Economics), the University of Chicago, University of Virginia, UCLA, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and George Mason University. She discusses at length the Thomas Jefferson Center for Political Economy and Social Philosophy that Buchanan founded at the University of Virginia, which produced many fine scholars in the classical liberal tradition.

Throughout the book, MacLean strains mightily to distort Buchanan’s views to make him sound as outlandish as possible. For example, on page 49 she quotes Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia as having been opposed to any government borrowing at all for “public investments” and then writes that Byrd “would have applauded the book on public debt that Buchanan was writing at the time.” She is implying here that Buchanan shared this view of debt, which he did not. If she had read Buchanan’s book on public debt she would have learned that he approved of government debt for infrastructure, for example, as long as the taxes to service the debt were earmarked for that purpose.

There is a long-winded discussion of the resistance to desegre-gation of education in Virginia in the 1960s, which seems totally irrelevant to the supposed theme of the book, or to anything Buchanan was writing about at the time. Again, her purpose here seems to be to argue that the origins of modern libertarianism are in the Virginia opponents of desegregation. “In these final hours of the massive resistance [to desegregation] era… can be found the seed of the ideas guiding today’s attack on the public sector and robust democracy alike,” she writes on page 72.

:{:{Another  outlandish  falsehood  in  Democracy  in  Chains  isMacLean’s statement on page 79 that “the major deficiency” of the Virginia School (i.e., the Public Choice School), is “the failure to search for empirical tests of the new theorie}:s.” [CHILE?]If MacLean had looked at any one issue of the journal Public Choiceshe would have learned that this is unequivocally untrue. Public Choice became very mainstream, and Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize for his part in it, precisely because there had been hundreds, or thousands, of published econometric tests of its propositions.

Bob Tollison alone, Buchanan’s most prolific student, authored and co-authored literally hundreds of academic journal articles that were econometric tests of various hypotheses drawn from public choice theory. I personally attended every weekly Public Choice seminar, and every economics department seminar, at VPI from September 1976 to June 1979 as a graduate student and can attest that at least 90 percent of all the papers presented there contained some kind of empirical test. MacLean’s assertion is preposterous.}:

It’s hard to believe that with all the effort that went into this book, sitting in Buchanan House for weeks on end, she never once looked at an issue of Public Choice on the shelf in Buchanan’s office.

Among the mountain of falsehoods in this book is the further statement on page 98 that public choice scholars involved in the rent-seeking literature “depicted as rent-seeking any collective efforts by citizens or public servants to prompt government action that involved tax revenues” (emphasis added). This is another silly falsehood. Buchanan and Tullock were not anarchists; they were proponents of limited, constitutional government who generally approved of the use of taxation for the constitutional functions of government. This viewpoint is quite pervasive in the rent-seeking literature for anyone who looks for it. This literature is highly empirical, as most of public choice research is, yet MacLean falsely claims that it only involves “hypothetical scenarios with no true research—no facts—to support them . . .” (p. 98).

MacLean discusses Buchanan’s departure from the University of Virginia after Gordon Tullock was denied a promotion to full professor for the third time, an act that Buchanan believed was an outrage, considering Tullock’s achievements and reputation in the economics profession at the time. MacLean basically slanders the late Gordon Tullock by quoting an anonymous person who supposedly called him a “twit;” writing that “he was an awful teacher;” and “his publication record—apart from the book he coauthored with Buchanan—was undistinguished.” He didn’t deserve the promotion, in other words, so there must have been some other reason for Buchanan’s departure from Virginia.

I took Gordon Tullock’s Ph.D.-level seminar course in Public Choice in the fall of 1977 with some of the survivors of the first year of the graduate economics program at VPI (about half dropped out or flunked out after the first year). The Calculus of Consent was one of the textbooks and Tullock, being a University of Chicago-trained legal scholar, conducted the class like a law professor—or at least like the Harvard law professor portrayed in the movie Paper Chase.

He would come to each class with a couple of questions that were of the sort that they could have been final exam questions, research paper topics, or even dissertation topics in public choice. He would arbitrarily hand one of us a piece of chalk, and instruct us to stand in front of the rest of the class at the blackboard and explain how we would go about answering the question. It became a team effort, led by the professor, to think through the problem. He was always helpful and encouraging, sharing his great learning with us. He was not an “awful” teacher.

As for MacLean’s smear that Tullock’s publication record was “undistinguished,” she should have taken ten seconds or so to Google “Gordon Tullock vita.” She would have discovered that by the time Buchanan and Tullock left Virginia Tullock had published sixbooks, not one (The Calculus of Consentwith Buchanan;The Politics of Bureaucracy;The Organization of Inquiry;Toward a Math-ematics of Politics;Private Wants, Public Means; andThe Logic of the Law). In addition, he had published four articles in the prestigious Journal of Political Economy, four in theAmerican Economic Review, and others in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Economic History Review,Oxford Economic Papers,Economic Journal,Western Economic Journal,Il Politico, andSocial Science Quarterly, among others. All while founding and editing Public Choice and refereeing at least half of all the articles himself.

The second half of Democracy in Chains is mostly about Charles Koch, the network of conservative and libertarian organizations that he has funded, and his relationship, such as it was, with James Buchanan. MacLean accurately states that after spending many millions of dollars over some three decades, Koch’s efforts “produced few results” (p. 127). [Cato civil war] She details how Koch worked with Murray Rothbard to co-found the Cato Institute, but says nothing at all about how Koch later confiscated Rothbard’s shares in the organization and disassociated himself with Rothbard. No mention is made of this, or of the reasons why the two men had a falling out. She does get much of the Koch story backwards, however, by saying that Charles Koch insisted that his well-funded minions remain “uncompromisingly radical” (p. 145). That, in fact, is why Rothbard was booted—he was in fact uncompromisingly radical whereas Koch, who moved the Cato Institute from California to Washington, D.C., was not. He wanted to pursue a patently un-radical plan of trying to teach free-market and libertarian prin-ciples to the Washington, D.C. bureaucracy—at least in a watered-down and compromised formthat would not be too offensive to them.

That has always been the Cato Institute’s business plan.

In the middle of her discussion of Koch, MacLean inserts a diversion chapter to take one more swipe at Buchanan by noting that he, like Milton Friedman, had accepted an invitation from faculty members to speak at a Chilean university after the overthrow of the socialist government there in the 1970s. (The faculty members were University of Chicago graduates). He offered advice to the Chilean students and faculty about a balanced budget, an independent central bank, and the importance of some kind of system of consti-tutional checks and balances. MacLean uses this narrative to repeat once again the ridiculous falsehood that “there was no empirical research” in the public choice literature (p. 158) in order to make the argument that Buchanan was spouting nonsense to his Chilean hosts. The main purpose of this diversion chapter is apparently to once again attempt to imply that “libertarianism” is really an evil, stealthy, centuries-long plot to benefit dictators and billionaires at the expense of the rest of society. And MacLean claims that it is public choice economists who lack facts and evidence!

One interesting and informative part of the book is MacLean’s discussion in the last two chapters of how Charles Koch and his lieu-tenant, Richie Fink, talked seventy-nine-year-old James Buchanan into lending his name to an organization on the George Mason campus that would become essentially a lobbying arm of Koch Industries. The James Buchanan Center, funded by a $10 million grant to George Mason University in 1997, was staffed mostly by non-academics who conducted “outreach” programs for “Senators, Congressmen, and state legislators, legislative staff and regu-lators….” (p. 199). Some academics were involved, but they were in the minority, writes MacLean. Most were apparently Richie Fink’s political cronies from the D.C. corporate lobbying world.

Buchanan was not happy with this arrangement. MacLean uncovered a September 17, 1998 memo from Buchanan to Fink in the files at Buchanan House in which Buchanan wrote: “Quite frankly, I am pissed off.” What was being done under his name “verges on fraud and surely, at a minimum amounts to exploi-tation of me, of you, of JBC [the James Buchanan Center], of the university” (p. 201). “Buchanan had been played like a fiddle” by Koch and Fink, writes MacLean, and she is right. Buchanan retired to his farm in Blacksburg soon thereafter.

Buchanan was not the only George Mason faculty member who was disgusted with the Koch/Fink gambit. The late Charles Rowley, a distinguished public choice and law and economics scholar whom Buchanan had brought from England to George Mason and the Public Choice Center in 1985, wrote on his blog in 2012 that Richie Fink, Charles Koch’s top “strategist,” was “a third-rate political hack” and “a man who is very appropriately named” (p. 209). “Far too many libertarians have been seduced by Koch money into providing intellectual ammunition for an autocratic businessman,” he wrote. Many libertarians understood this, Rowley said, but remained silent because “too many of them benefit financially from the pocket money doled out by Charles and David Koch.”

When Buchanan died in 2013 Nancy MacLean attended the memorial service for him in Fairfax. “[N]either Koch nor Fink… bothered to attend his memorial service,” she noticed. “Why should they? His days of usefulness to them had passed” (p. 204).

MacLean’s concluding chapter repeats for about the hundredth time her neo-Marxist, ad hominem theme that the whole history of classical liberalism, or libertarianism, is that of a small number of people working as paid apologists first for slave owners, and now for billionaires who want to use the powers of the state to line their own pockets at the expense of the rest of society. This is perhaps why, in a book about libertarianism in America, she completely ignores Ron Paul’s extraordinary, worldwide popularity; the millions of voters who wanted him to become president; his voluminous writings and speeches; and the millions of dollars of spontaneous individual contributions to his campaigns based on nothing more than his recitation of libertarian economics, defense of civil liberties, and his advocacy of a foreign policy of national defense instead of offense.

MacLean also completely ignores the educational institution that Ron Paul is most closely associated with, the Mises Institute, and the more than two dozen Mises institutes around the world (Chafuen, 2014). Not to mention the thousands of independent libertarian scholars, bloggers, columnists, authors, radio and podcast hosts, television personalities, and others. Acknowledging the existence of any of this would contradict her hoary Marxist-inspired, ad hominem theme that opponents of socialism and defenders of freedom and property rights are all “capitalist tools,” paid liars for corporate plutocrats. This reality also makes her conspiracy theory of “the radical right’s stealth plan for America” appear to be simply crazy.

REFERENCES

Chafuen, Alejandro. 2014. “Ludwig von Mises: Inspiring Think Tanks

Across the Globe.” Forbes, August 20, 2014.

Raico,    Ralph.  2006.  “Classical  Liberal  Roots  of  the  Marxist

Doctrine of Classes,” Available at https://mises.org/library/ classical-liberal-roots-marxist-doctrine-classes.

Woods, Tom. 2010. Nullification: How to Resist Tyranny in the 21st Century.

Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing.

The Best of Thomas DiLorenzo

==

Not surprisingly, the blunt professor has made his share of enemies. He is, of course, a favorite bobo doll for tobacco companies. They love to punch him; he loves to come bouncing back up. "He's apparently addicted to puff pieces, because there's been one in about every publication you can find," says Tom Lauria, a spokesman for the Tobacco Institute. He says Glantz's research has no validity because the professor has it out for the tobacco companies.

Thomas DiLorenzo, a conservative professor of economics at Loyola College in Baltimore, has slammed Glantz and others for taking government money for anti-tobacco research. "I'm a nonsmoker. I agree 100 percent that cigarettes are unhealthy," DiLorenzo says. "I just think it's illegal and unethical to use taxpayer money to organize a lobbying effort to prohibit cigarettes."

Glantz counters that his government-funded research is designed to improve public health--and that often means criticizing tobacco companies and the politicians they support.

"He just calmly tries to tell the documented truth," says Martin Perl, a Stanford physicist, Nobel laureate and Glantz fan. "He's not a zealot."

==

http://www.targetliberty.com/2014/12/my-experiences-at-cato-institute-by.html

Monday, December 29, 2014

My Experiences at the Cato Institute by Thomas DiLorenzo

In light of the recent firing of Vaclav Klaus by the Cato Institute (SEE: Vaclav Klaus Fired By Cato), I have contacted others who have also seemingly had unusual departures from the Institute, and offered Target Liberty as a platform through which they can tell their stories. Below Thomas Dilorenzo tells his story-RW

I became an adjunct scholar at Cato in the early 80s when I was ayoung assistant professor of economics at George Mason University. They published two of my books with James Bennett --Underground Government: The Off-Budget Public Sector, and Destroying Democracy: How Government Funds Partisan Politics-- and many of my "policy analysis" articles and some Cato Journalarticles.  Both books were very successful. I was also one of the very first Cato scholars to publish a piece in the Wall Street Journal. 

 I recall Ed Crane, the former president of Cato, quizzing me on my opinion of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory.  The "acceptable" opinion was that it was nonsense.  I also recall Jim Dorn, editor of the Cato Journal, calling me over the phone to try to get me to delete a footnoted reference toMurray Rothbard's book, America's Great Depression, in one of my Cato Journal articles.  I did not comply.  So there was a relatively mild anti-Mises/Rothbard ideology at Cato at the beginning.  Hayek was acceptable, but Mises and Rothbard were apparently an embarrassment to them even though Rothbard was one of the founders of the institution.  

I also recall sitting at dinner at a Liberty Fund conference in Banff, Canada, with Milton Friedman and Ed Crane shortly before Cato built its big glass building in D.C.  Friedman was opposed to it, arguing to Crane that such a permanent presence in D.C. would be corrupting.  My former professor and GMU colleague, the Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan, was of the same opinion.  They were right.  Shortly after that, Sheldon Richman was working at Cato as an editor.  I sent him some op-ed articles and they all came back very watered down and wishy-washy (not by Sheldon but by someone else at Cato, probably Bill Niskanen).  My impression was that they were edited to be "acceptable" to congressional staffers.  That, it turns out, was the Charles Koch model for Cato: to influence the Washington Establishment.  Of course, in retrospect we all know that the opposite has happened -- the Washington Establishment has thoroughly corrupted Cato.

Then, since I had established a bit of a reputation through my publications as a critic of antitrust regulation, I was asked to write the chapter of the Cato Handbook for Congress on antitrust.  It came back so severely edited that I did not recognize it.  I had made a case for the abolition of antitrust, but the edited version recommended only tiny, marginal changes in the kind of regulation -- the kind of thing one would expect from the left-wing Brookings Institution.

Around that time, a real, genuine, Austrian economics-inspired, free-market institution was established.  I speak of course of the Mises Institute.  I immediately sent Rothbard a small donation, and he sent me a Mises necktie as a thank you.  I wrote him back saying that I would wear it proudly and was sure that it would have a similar effect in the halls of academe to flashing a cross in front of Dracula.  I was told that he laughed his head off at that.  I then began sending my op-eds to the Mises Institute instead, and publishing them in The Free Market.I got the opposite reaction from the one I got from Cato -- send us more, they said, not "make it acceptable to the Democrats on Capitol Hill."

I also participated in a few of the early Mises Institute conferences by presenting papers there.  That was apparently the last straw for Cato.  They dumped me around the same time that they dumped the great Professor Ralph Raico, who had also expressed his admiration for the Misesian wing of the Austrian School.  I was a mere "adjunct scholar," of which there were already many, but Ralph had some kind of senior scholar designation and I was very surprised that they unceremoniously dumped him a week or so before they dumped me with a terse letter from Jim Dorn.

Milton Friedman was right: Washington,D.C. has thoroughly corrupted the Cato Institute. For example, Cato held its annual Fed conference for more than a quarter of a century before it ever invited Ron Paul, the most famous libertarian critic of the Fed, to speak. Meanwhile, hundreds of Fed bureaucrats had spoken at its conferences and published their speeches in the Cato Journal.  It was only after Ron became a presidential candidate and began drawing gigantic audiences that he was invited -- after some people associated with Cato had orchestrated a vicious smear campaign against him.  Ever the crusader for free markets, Ron accepted their invitation anyway despite all of the conniving smears against him by some of the weasely nobodies at Cato.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and a member of the senior faculty of the Mises Institute.  He is author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War and Lincoln Unmasked: What You're Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe.  WACKO?

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...

[bennett?]

...he and DiLorenzo were doing on a book titled CancerScam: The Diversion of Federal Cancer Funds to Politics.22 This book, published in 1997, attacked government-funded health agencies and health charities, charging that they were deviating from their missions and using donated funds irresponsibly by engaging in excessive political and lobbying activity.145 The book specifically attacked Glantz, claiming he was “getting rich” by using tax funds for lobbying.145 

CancerScam conformed to Philip Morris' action plan by “elevating the issue of public funding (primarily federal) to conduct anti-tobacco … research”100 and accusing government agencies and health charities of diverting funding away from “the common goal of finding a cure for cancer.”100 DiLorenzo also made a Freedom of Information Act request for information about Glantz's NCI grant, and he forwarded the information received from NCI to Philip Morris' law firm Arnold and Porterin 1995. The firm forwarded the information to the director of Philip Morris' Washington relations office.146

On July 15, 1995, a few weeks before his National Review article was published, DiLorenzo appeared on the Philip Morris–supported147–149 PBS television program Technopolitics,hosted byJames Glassman[TCS]. (Philip Morris had liaisons assigned to Technopolitics andNational Review as part of its “Managing the Message—Conservative Media Cultivation” effort.150) The single topic of the half-hour Technopolitics show was Glantz's NCI grant.

 On the show, DiLorenzo described Glantz's NCI grant as the “government paying citizens to spy on other citizens” and called it “atrocious.” He concluded, “Every dollar that is spent on these political gadflies is not spent on basic cancer research,”23 yet another statement that reflected Philip Morris' plan to claim that Glantz's NCI research “does nothing to advance the common goal of finding cures for cancer.”100 From 1993 to 1995 Philip Morris donated $630 000147–149 to South CarolinaEducational Television to support Technopolitics. The 1994 contribution was one of Philip Morris' largest “charitable contributions” that year.151...

---

uchic bk review

S. Robert  Lichter;, Stanley  Rothman. Environmental Cancer: A Political Disease? xiv + 235 pp., figs., tables, bibl., index. New Haven, Conn./London: Yale University Press, 1999. $35 (cloth); $17 (paper).

James T. Bennett [gmu]

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/380674?journalCode=isis

==

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/James_T._Bennett

Dr. James T. Bennett received his Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University in 1970. He is founder and editor of the Journal of Labor Research.

Current Positions:

• Advisory Board, Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow
• Eminent Scholar at George Mason University
  • holds the William P. Snavely Chair of Political Economy and Public Policy in the Department of Economics
• Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Employment Practice and Policy
• Adjunct Scholar of the Heritage Foundation
• Member of the Mont Pelerin Society
• Member of the Philadelphia Society
• Program Director of the Locke Institute

The 'John M. Olin Institute for Employment Practice and Policy' is the publisher of the Journal of Labor Research. [1]

• 1James Bennett and the Tobacco Industry
  • 1.1Books co-authored by James Bennett and Thomas DiLorenzo
• 2Related SourceWatch Resources
• 3Related Links

James Bennett and the Tobacco Industry

Bennett has staged media campaigns and co-authored books funded by tobacco companies with Thomas DiLorenzo of George Mason University. In 1990, Bennett and DiLorenzo submitted a $150'000 project proposal to RJR, the objective of which was "to discredit the voluntary health agencies in the minds of the public." [2] In 1995, they billed RJR $100,000 [3] to produce a book a called Cancerscam: the diversion of federal cancer funds to politics, that attacked health charities for spending what the authors deemed a disproportionate amount of their income on political advocacy. The authors argued the money should be spent on research instead. The Cancerscam book comported perfectly with a 1993 Philip Morris internal Corporate Affairs plan to work towards constraining health charities by restricting how much of their funds could be spent on research and capping the amount the charities could spend on salaries and lobbying. Bates Page -6028 of the 119 page plan

Books co-authored by James Bennett and Thomas DiLorenzo

• Underground Government: The Off-Budget Public Sector (Softcover) by James T. Bennett, Thomas J. Dilorenzo, Cato Institute, 1983.
• Destroying Democracy: How Government Funds Partisan Politics (Hardcober) by James T. Bennett, Thomas J. Dilorenzo, Cato Institute, 1986.
• Unfair Competition: The Profits of Nonprofits (Hardcover) by James T. Bennett, Thomas J. Dilorenzo, Hamilton Press, 1989.
• Official Lies: How Washington Misleads Us (Hardcover) by James T. Bennett, Thomas J. Dilorenzo, Attitude Media, 1992.
• Unhealthy Charities: Hazardous to Your Health and Wealth (Paperback) by James T. Bennett, Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Basic Books, June 1995.
• Cancer Scam: Diversion of Federal Cancer Funds to Politics (Hardcover) by James T. Bennett, Thomas J. Dilorenzo, Transaction Publishers, 1997
• The Food & Drink Police: America's Nannies, Busybodies & Petty Tyrants (Paperback) by James T. Bennett, Thomas J. Dilorenzo, Transaction Publishers, 1999.
• Public Health Profiteering (Hardcover) by James T. Bennett, Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Transaction Publishers, August 2001.
• From Pathology to Politics: Public Health in America (Paperback) by James T. Bennett, Thomas J. Dilorenzo, Transaction Publishers, 2008.

Related SourceWatch Resources

• Capital Research Center and the tobacco industry
• Thomas DiLorenzo (co-authored pro-tobacco industry books with James T. Bennett]]

Related Links

• "James T. Bennett", George Mason University

Categories: 

• Tobaccowiki
• Tobacco documents biographies

==

---

INDUSTRY ATTACKS SPREAD TO MAGAZINES, BOOKS, TELEVISION

In late 1994, an employee of the Missouri Department of Agriculture and researcher for the American Smokers Alliance, whom Philip Morris considered to be a “grower ally,”36 sent aFreedom of Information Act request to the NCI for information about Glantz's grant application.

 (The American Smokers Alliance encouraged members to act as researchers, specifically instructing them to use the Freedom of Information Act.38) The employee obtained Glantz's NCI grant information and forwarded it to Walt Klein & Associates, who in turn sent it to RJ Reynolds' external relations office.137 In March 1995, RJ Reynolds enlisted Walt Klein & Associates to foster and augment the appearance of a public clamor to remove Glantz's funding. The public relations firm drafted several op-ed pieces criticizing Glantz's work as “bogus” and “deeply flawed” and demanding that the NCI terminate his funding.138–140 We were unable to determine whether any of these op-ed pieces were published.

On August 28, 1995, an article titled “Policing P[olitical] C[orrectness]: How the government is stacking the deck in the debate over smoking”141 was published in the National Review, a magazine of conservative opinion.142 The article attacked Glantz and his NCI funding, portraying him as a prohibitionist and calling his NCI funding a “gross abuse of bureaucratic authority.” 

A short biosketch of the author, Thomas DiLorenzo, PhD, described him only as “a professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.”141 Prior to publishing “Policing PC,” DiLorenzo had worked on a number of tobacco industry projects, including a Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds–funded project at the Independent Institute (a tobacco industry–funded think tank143), and contributed to publications by the Capital Research Center (another think tank, described as a “long-time friend of PM” in a 1998 internal Philip Morris e-mail1:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}::{44).

The same month that the “Policing PC” article was published, James Bennett of George Mason University billed RJ Reynolds $150 000 for work he and DiLorenzo were doing on a book titled CancerScam: The Diversion of Federal Cancer Funds to Politics.22 

This book, published in 1997, attacked government-funded health agencies and health charities, charging that they were deviating from their missions and using donated funds irresponsibly by engaging in excessive political and lobbying activity.145 The book specifically attacked Glantz, claiming he was “getting rich” by using tax funds for lobbying.145 CancerScam conformed to Philip Morris' action plan by “elevating the issue of public funding (primarily federal) to conduct anti-tobacco … research”100 and accusing government agencies and health charities of diverting funding away from “the common goal of finding a cure for cancer.”100 DiLorenzo also made a Freedom of Information Act request for information about Glantz's NCI grant, and he forwarded the information received from NCI to Philip Morris' law firm Arnold and Porter in 1995. The firm forwarded the information to the director of Philip Morris' Washington relations office.1:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}::{46

:{:{On July 15, 1995, a few weeks before his}::{ National Review article was published, DiLorenzo appeared on the Philip Morris–supported147–149 PBS t}::{elevision program }:Technopolitics,:{hosted by James Glassman. (Philip Morris had liaisons assigned to }:Technopolitics:{ and}:National Review:{ as part of its “Managing the Message—Conservative Media Cultivation” effort.150)

The single topic of the half-hour Technopolitics show was Glantz's NCI grant. On the show, DiLorenzo described Glantz's NCI grant as the “government paying citizens to spy on other citizens” and called it “atrocious.” He concluded, “Every dollar that is spent on these political gadflies is not spent on basic cancer research,”23 yet another statement that reflected Philip Morris' plan to claim that Glantz's NCI research “does nothing to advance the common goal of finding cures for cancer.”100 From 1993 to 1995 Philip Morris donated $630 000147–149 to South Carolina Educational Television to support Technopolitics. The 1994 contribution was one of Philip Morris' largest “charitable contributions” that year.151}:}:

==

==

bast bs book list:

HEARTLAND REPLIES TO NAOMI ORESKES

MARCH 31, 2017

By JosephBast

We oppose climate alarmism because we know it is a fraud, a disinformation campaign used by the left to advance the same anti-human agenda they were pushing in the 1960s and 1970s.

Naomi Oreskes, the socialist historian who has done so much to politicize and discredit climate science in recent years, was recently interviewed in a fawning piece by Alvin Powell in the Harvard Gazette. Near the end of the article, Powell writes:

Denial, she said, isn’t about science but about individualism, skepticism of government power, the self-interest of those in affected industries, and conceptions of freedom. For those moved by those concerns, climate change is just the latest in a series of scientific problems leading to greater government intrusion. Disputing climate facts has roots in fear, Oreskes said — not of climate, but of higher taxes, bigger government, and lost freedoms. That’s why fighting on the facts is not enough, she said. Deploying a value-based argument — such as the values of fairness, of responsibility, of protecting health — is crucial.

As is typical of Oreskes and other leftists, she’s mixing truth with lies.

I and other spokespersons for The Heartland Institute have made the argument frequently that the climate debate isn’t about science, but about “higher taxes, bigger government, and lost freedoms.” We entered the debate as libertarians, not as scientists, but with a commitment to learn the science in order to find the truth behind a campaign waged against freedom by the left. This is why we published some 9.9 million words about climate science between 1998 and 2013 (according to an article in Global Environmental Change), more, I would guess, than all but a handful of other think tanks in the world.

We don’t criticize the warmists’ science out of fear that climate change somehow demonstrates that capitalism can’t work. That’s silly. Capitalism can survive and has survived natural climate changes much greater than the amounts likely to occur in coming centuries. Capitalism is why people value protecting the planet today and have both the will and the means to do so.Capitalism thrives on solving problems like those created by climate change. It’s easy. It’s called “adaptation” and “insurance.”

We entered the climate debate because of copious evidence that progressives, communists included, had infiltrated the scientific debate and were misrepresenting and “weaponizing” the science in order to advance their agenda. The names, dates, and important episodes of the left’s take-over of the environmental movement, and then of EPA, were reported in many books, none of them published by The Heartland Institute:

Ron Arnold, Freezing in the Dark: Money, Power, Politics and the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, 2007.

Wilfred Beckerman, Through Green-Colored Glasses: Environmentalism Reconsidered, 1996.

Larry Bell, Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax, 2011.

James T. Bennett and Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Cancer Scam: Diversion of Federal Cancer Funds to Politics, 1998.

Alex B. Berezow andHank Campbell, Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left, 2012.

Rupert Darwall, The Age of Global Warming: A History, 2013.

Jeff Gillman and Eric Heberlig, How the Government Got In Your Backyard, 2011.

Indur M. Goklany, The Precautionary Principle: A Critical Appraisal of Environmental Risk Assessment, 2001.

Geoffrey C. Kabat, Hyping Health Risks: Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of Epidemiology, 2008.

Wallace Kaufman, No Turning Back: Dismantling the Fantasies of Environmental Thinking, 1994.

Aynsley Kellow, Science and Public Policy: The Virtuous Corruption of Virtual Environmental Science, 2007.

S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman, Environmental Cancer – A Political Disease? 1999.

Christopher Manes, Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization, 1990.

Patrick J. Michaelsand Paul C. Knappenberger, Lukewarming: The New Climate Science that Changes Everything, 2016.

Steven J. Milloy, Junk Science Judo: Self-Defense Against Health Scares and Scams, 2001.

A.W. Montford, The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science, 2010.

Daniel T. Oliver, Animal Rights: The Inhumane Crusade, 1999.

James M. Sheehan, Global Greens: Inside the International Environmental Establishment, 1998.

Julian Simon, Hoodwinking the Nation, 1999.

Zubrin, Robert, Merchants of Despair, 2012.

These books – and I could list many more like them -- were our reason for “looking under the hood” at the underlying science behind the global warming scare. Leftists have no reason to look at the science, since it supports their agenda. We do.

What we found were leftists flooding university science departments, science societies, and organizations such as EPA and the IPCC. We saw liberal foundationsturning small environmental groups such as Ozone Action into mammoth direct mail machines and reliable allies of the Democratic Party such as Greenpeace USA. And we saw computer models, postulates, and circumstantial evidence parading as real science… in short, a fraud.

We oppose climate alarmism because we know it is a fraud, a disinformation campaign used by the left to advance the same anti-human agenda they were pushing in the 1960s and 1970s, when (as Robert Zubrin carefully documents in Merchants of Despair), eugenics and population control were their “science,” long before “global warming” took their place.

==

==

 Routledge; 1 edition (November 30, 1997)

co author many variations on  theme: https://www.amazon.com/James-T.-Bennett/e/B001HCX0V6/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

Transaction Publishers (January 1, 1997)

amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/CancerScam-Diversion-Federal-Cancer-Politics/dp/1560003340

bs

For decades, the American Cancer Society (ACS) explicitly forbade acceptance or use of taxpayers' funds from government at any level. However, as public support for programs began to diminish and revenue growth leveled off, the ACS reversed this policy. It now actively seeks taxpayers' funds. In this sense it reflects a model of how America's major health charities are abandoning their traditional goodwill purposes and becoming political organizations. As donors become disenchanted, the charities view the taxpayer as an alternative, and far more reliable, source of funds and devote their political activity to raising taxes and earmarking the increased revenues for themselves. Health charities subsequently lose their independence as the distinction between government and private charities becomes blurred.

CancerScam investigates Project ASSIST, the joint undertaking between the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute (NCI). CancerScam details the charities' collaborative efforts to divert millions of dollars in federal cancer funds--under the guise of improving the public health through reducing smoking--to build political coalitions. Bennett and DiLorenzo suggest that the antitobacco campaign is a smokescreen for raising taxes on tobacco and earmarking the increased revenues for the financial benefit of ACS and its allied charities. 

CancerScam reveals how concern about the AIDS lobby's success in obtaining scarce research funds motivated the NCI to build political coalitions at the grass-roots level which could lobby for federal funding of cancer research.[cf forbe larry bell bs 2014] Bennett and DiLorenzo believe that public support of the ACS will be undermined when its emphasis on politics becomes better known and its reputation erodes as it is perceived as little more than an extension of government, subject to bureaucratic regulation and loss of independence.

CancerScam is the follow-up to Bennett and DiLorenzo's Unhealthy Charities: Hazardous to Your Health and Wealth. It is a brave effort that brilliantly shows how government bureaucrats steal funds intended for the highest public purposes and use them for narrow political advancement. As such it will be of interest to those interested in public policy and political science, nonprofit executives, and policymakers

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

According to James T. Bennett and Thomas J. DiLorenzo, authors of Cancerscam,smoking can be good for society,if not for the smoker. Consider all the money the government could save, for instance, on social security if millions of people die young from smoking-related illnesses. Much of Bennett and DiLorenzo's book is taken up with their argument that the government's campaign against smoking is intrusive and unwarranted. They liken smoking to other hazardous choices such as skydiving or skateboarding and point out that there is no national campaign to educate practitioners of these activities.

They then launch into an attack on the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society, which they accuse of diverting funds into an antismoking program run by a left-wing public interest organization.Cigarette manufacturers and major stockholders in tobacco companies will love this book; those who deal with the medical, social, and personal fall-out from smoking, on the other hand, will find little to agree with here.

Review

"The biggest Washington scandals often involve taxpayer money earmarked for causes no one could object to, such as cancer research. That immunity from criticism often means that taxpayers see their money diverted to politics and puffery, with few tangible results. CancerScam is the first effort—and a brave one—to expose this outrage."

—John Fund, The Wall Street Journal

"Bennett and DiLorenzo have been in the trenches showing in great detail how tax-funded politics is hazardous to your health. CancerScam continues their tireless efforts to inform the American taxpayers about how millions of tax dollars are diverted each year to lobbying and blatant political advocacy by groups that seem far more concerned about getting their hands in taxpayers' pockets than with their ostensibly charitable purposes. Their work reinforces my determination to have Congress end this improper—and illegal—use of taxpayers' dollars for politics."

—David Mclntosh, former Congressman from Indiana

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“The Mises Institute is a 501(c)(3) so contributions are deductible to the full extent the law allows. Ludwig von Mises Institute for Austrian Economics, Tax ID 52-1263436

They hate government so much, they’re a government-sanctioned and regulated tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization.

==

Thomas J. DiLorenzo is/was a Professor of Economics at Loyola College in Maryland and George Mason University who attacked tobacco control researchers in the press. He is currently a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. [1]

• Advisory Board, Second Vermont Republic ^[1]
• Advisory Board, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow ^[2]
• :{Columnist, :{Lewrockwell:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:.com ^[3]}:

 DiLorenzo and the Tobacco Industry

DiLorenzo served as a research fellow at the Independent Institute and the Capital Research Center, two public policy think tanks that have accepted tobacco industry funding.[2] In 1994 the Independent Institute accepted funds from R.J. Reynolds (RJR) specifically to fund anti-tobacco control research by DiLorenzo.[3]

DiLorenzo was paid $30,000 by R.J. Reynolds to write a book called "CancerScam" denigrating the ASSIST Project, a 17-state national tobacco control program, and "Unhealthy Charities" a book attacking the major voluntary health charities (American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, American Lung Association). Pay request was sent to R.J. Reynolds and payments made to the Atlas Economic Research Foundation.^[4]

DiLorenzo has co-authored books funded by tobacco companies with James T. Bennett of George Mason University. In 1995, Bennett and DiLorenzo billed RJR $100,000 [4] to produce a book a called Cancerscam: the diversion of federal cancer funds to politics, that attacked health charities for spending what the authors deemed a disproportionate amount of their income on political advocacy. The authors argued the money should be spent on research instead. The Cancerscam book comported perfectly with a 1993 Philip Morris internal Corporate Affairs plan to work towards constraining health charities by restricting how much of their funds could be spent on research and capping the amount the charities could spend on salaries and lobbying. Bates Page -6028 of the 119 page plan

 Books and Publications by Thomas DiLorenzo

• The Mirage of Sustainable Development, article from The Futurist (Magazine/Journal) September 1, 1993.
• Unhealthy Charities:Hazardous to Your Health and Wealth (Paperback) by James T. Bennett, Thomas J. Dilorenzo, June 1995,Basic Books.
• Public Health Profiteering (Hardcover) by James T. Bennett, Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Transaction Publishers, August 2001.

Contact Information

Thomas DiLorenzo

Ludwig von Mises Institute

518 West Magnolia Avenue

Auburn, Alabama 36832-4528

Phone: 334 321-2100

 Resources and articles

 References

1. ↑ Advisory Board, Second Vermont Republic, accessed January 5, 2009.
2. ↑ Advisory Board, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, accessed September 19, 2008.
3. ↑ About, Lewrockwell.com, accessed June 24, 2009.
4. ↑ J.T. Bennett, George Mason University This letter sumnarizes our discussion on August 18 regarding our activities during the coming year. Letter. August 31, 1995. 1 page. Bates No. 517118301

This article may include information from Tobacco Documents Online.

Categories: Tobaccowiki | Academia | Think tanks/personnel | United States | Non-Government Organizations | Activism | Tobacco industry | Tobacco documents biographies | Cancer | Economics | Health

---

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Thomas_J._DiLorenzo

1/18

Thomas J. DiLorenzo was a Professor of Economics at Loyola College in Maryland and George Mason University who attacked tobacco control researchers in the press. He then moved on to a position as Senior Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. [1]

DiLorenzo was a minor figure in the Cash for Comments Economists Network run by Robert Tollison out of the libertarian think-tank, the Center for Study of Public Choice at George Mason University. The tobacco industry paid James Savarese and his staff (at James Savarese & Associates) to organise and oversee the operations and keep it at arm's length. This was a Tobacco Institute operation which went on for many years.

Its aim was to keep pressure on Congress and State Assemblies not to increase excise taxes on cigarettes - or to pass legislation that would ban cigarette advertising - and to stop them blocking sales via vending machines (mainly to minors). Because of the ad-ban threat, they had the tacit support of many media outlets in promoting this message. Their input was generally in the form of 1000-1200 word op-eds for a designated newspaper, or a letter to the editor on a subject the Tobacco Institute wanted promoted. They would be paid $700 to $1500 for each piece published, with a bonus if personal letters were sent to two local Congressmen.

In the mid 1990s there appears to have been a break up of the larger network with most of the non-core members joining William Shughart in working through the Independent Institute. Savarese and Tollision, however, continued to work through George Mason University. DiLorenzo served as a research fellow at the Independent Institute and the Capital Research Center, two public policy think tanks that have accepted tobacco industryfunding.[3]

• :{1:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Documents & Timelines:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
• :{2:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Books and Publications by Thomas DiLorenzo:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
• :{3:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Contact Information:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
• :{4:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Resources and articles:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
  • :{4.1:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Related Sourcewatch articles:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
  • :{4.2:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{References:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
  • 4.3:{External Sources

...}:

much more, timeline]

==

 wiki

Thomas James DiLorenzo (born August 8, 1954) is an American economics professor at Loyola University Maryland.^[2] He is an adherent of the Austrian School of Economics. He is a senior faculty member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and an associated scholar of the Abbeville Institute.^[3] He was formerly an affiliated scholar of the League of the South Institute, the research arm of the pro-secession League of the South^[4] (though he has denied any lasting affiliation, noting that he only gave a few lectures there shortly after its founding^[5][6]). He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Virginia Tech.^[2]

Scholarship

See also: Lincoln Unmasked and The Real Lincoln

DiLorenzo has devoted much effort to scholarly historical revisionism, focusing on what has been called "the Lincoln Cult"^[7] as a political and historical phenomenon. In the same vein, he has spoken out in favor of the secession of the Confederate States of America, defending the right of these states to secede in a view similar to that of abolitionist Lysander Spooner.^[8] He has also criticized the crediting of the New Deal for ending the Great Depression.^[9]

In 2002, DiLorenzo debated Harry V. Jaffa on the merits of Abraham Lincoln's statesmanship prior to and during the civil war.

DiLorenzo lectures widely, and is a frequent speaker at Mises Institute events.

The Southern Poverty Law Center considers DiLorenzo one of the most important intellectuals "who form the core of the modern neo-Confederate movement". They believe DiLorenzo's depiction of president Abraham Lincoln paints Lincoln as a "paragon of wickedness, a man secretly intent on destroying states' rights and building a massive federal government".^[10]

Publications

DiLorenzo has authored at least ten books, including:^[11]

• Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government (2012)
• Hamilton's Curse: How Jefferson's Arch Enemy Betrayed the American Revolution – and What It Means for Americans Today (2008)
• Lincoln Unmasked: What You're Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe (2006)
• How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold Story of Our Country's History, from the Pilgrims to the Present|How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present (2004)
• The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (2003)
• From Pathology to Politics: Public Health in America (2000)
• The Food and Drink Police: America's Nannies, Busybodies, and Petty Tyrants (1998)
• CancerScam: The Diversion of Federal Cancer Funds for Politics (1997)

References

1. http://mises.org/daily/1623
2. ^ ^a ^b Sellinger Business school staff directory at Loyola
3. Abbeville Institute
4. League of the South Institute for the Study of Southern History and Culture
5. "My Associations with Liars, Bigots, and Murderers", Lewrockwell.com, February 11, 2011
6. Walker, Childs (February 11, 2011) "Loyola professor faces questions about ties to pro-secession group", The Baltimore Sun
7. "Confronting the Lincoln Cult," *Mises Daily* 3 June 2002
8. "An Abolitionist Defends the South," LewRockwell.com October 20, 2004]
9. "The New Deal Debunked (again)," *Mises Daily* September 27, 2004
10. Beirich, Heidi; Potok, Mark (Winter 2004). "The Ideologues". Intelligence Report. Issue 116.
11. Loyola University Maryland, listing of representative publications for Professor Thomas James Di Lorenzo

External links

• Mises Archive of DiLorenzo commentary Lectures by DiLorenzo at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
• Archive of DiLorenzo commentary for The Independent Institute
• Archive of DiLorenzo commentary for LewRockwell:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}::{.com
• The Real Abraham Lincoln - a debate between Thomas DiLorenzo and Harry V. Jaffa
• Critical review of *The Real Lincoln* by Thomas Krannawitter of the Claremont Institute
• DiLorenzo and his Critics by Clyde N. Wilson
• Interview with Thomas DiLorenzo in the " Southern Partisan".
• C-SPAN *Q&A* interview with DiLorenzo, about his two books on Abraham Lincoln, May 25, 2008
• The 2006 Steven Berger Seminar: Thomas DiLorenzo (10 videos)