Saturday, February 12, 2011

Nobel Award Winner Calls the Economic Rhetoric of the Second Vermont Republic Advisory Board Member Thomas J. DiLorenzo "Bizarre"

In a scathing column on Thursday, Paul Krugman, New York Times Op-Ed columnist and winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (2008), as well as recipient of the prestigious American Economic Association, John Bates Clark Medal (1991), and professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, ripped Second Vermont Republic advisory board member, Thomas J. DiLorenzo, a new one while touching upon DiLorenzo's obsession with Lincoln historical revisionism and other myths of the Old South:

"Mr. (Ron) Paul’s (R-TX) subcommittee called three witnesses, one of whom was an odd choice: Thomas DiLorenzo, a professor at Loyola University and a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute."

"What was odd about that choice? Well, Mr. DiLorenzo hasn’t actually written much about monetary policy, although he has described Fed policy — not just recently, but since the 1960s — as “legalized counterfeiting operations.” His main claim to fame, instead, is as a critic of Lincoln — he’s the author of “Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe” — and as a modern-day secessionist."

"No, really: calls for secession run through many of Mr. DiLorenzo’s writings — for example, in his declaration that “healthcare freedom” won’t be restored until “some states begin seceding from the new American fascialistic state.” Raise the rebel flag!"

"O.K., it’s going to be a while before the G.O.P. as a whole embraces neo-secessionism, and Mr. Paul, although highly visible, is, in fact, a somewhat marginal figure even within his own party. But Mr. (Paul) Ryan (R-WI), who led the other hearing — the one at which Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, testified — is a rising Republican star. So it’s worth noting that Mr. Ryan’s hard-money rhetoric was nearly as bizarre as Mr. DiLorenzo’s."
(The entire NY Times column may be read here)
Dilorenzo, you may recall, is the Lincoln historical revisionist lauded by "Vermont Commons" publisher, Rob Williams and VTCommons' white supremacist contributor, Robert S. Griffin (See here).

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