The title I gave, the Mises Institute, was Why the Constitution Had to be Destroyed.
That was many months ago, but I think I should have added a subtitle of, and how they did it.
And that's going to be the bulk of my talk, and how they did it.
And, of course, the Constitution has been effectively destroyed.
There really are no constitutional limits on the growth of government anymore.
Judge Andrew Napolitano, in his book, The Constitution in Exile,
noted that not a single federal law was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court from 1937
to 1995. So every once in a blue moon you'll see the Supreme Court ruling in favor of the people
and against the Washington establishment, but maybe not even a full moon. Every once a century
now is the way it is. So essentially we live in a regime of unlimited government. The only time
The only time Republicans ever really, apart from Ron Paul, ever talk about the Constitution is whenever they want to use it to block something the Democrats are trying to do.
And the only time you ever hear a Democrat in Congress talking about the Constitution is when they want to try to use it to block something the Republicans are trying to do at the moment.
But nobody believes in using it as a limit on governmental power, with the exception of Ron Paul and a few others.
In fact, five or six years ago,
Congressman Paul invited me to speak
to his Liberty Caucus in Washington, in his office.
It was about 10 or 11 members of Congress
who were like-minded.
And in some of the names would be familiar
to most of you, I suppose.
And one of the things these members of Congress
all nodded their heads to was when one of them said,
you can no longer be taken seriously in Congress
if you make constitutional arguments
against Any Governmental Program.
And so our rulers understand this.
They've won, they've succeeded.
And so I thought it would be useful
to try to tell the story of how this came about and why,
why the Constitution had to be destroyed
based on some of my research in economic history.
And I'm gonna just read you the answer.
This is why the Constitution had to be destroyed,
in my opinion.
So I guess I can sit down
after I read this paragraph here.
This was a statement by the late Murray Rothbard
in one of his books about the very beginning
of the American Republic.
The very beginning of the American Republic.
There always were the two factions in American politics.
You had the nationalists who wanted a powerful
central government that would be very active
and do all sorts of bad things.
And then you had the Jeffersonian wing,
the decentralists who wanted limited
Decentralized government, limited taxation, and so forth, and throughout the whole history of the country we've had a back and forth battle between the nationalists and the centralizers on the one hand, and the decentralizers and the more libertarian wing of American politics on the other, and here is how Rothbard described the nationalists, and of course Alexander Hamilton has always been looked at as the intellectual leader of the so-called nationalists of that time.
What were they about? What did they want at the beginning of the Republic when the American Revolution ended?
Here's what they wanted according to Rothbard. They wanted, quote, I'm quoting,
to reimpose in the new United States a system of mercantilism and big government similar to that in Great Britain,
against which the colonists had rebelled. The object was to have a strong central government,
particularly a strong president or king as chief executive built up by high taxes and heavy public debt the strong government was to impose high tariffs to subsidize domestic manufacturers develop a big Navy to open up and subsidize foreign markets for American exports and launch a massive system of internal public works in short the United States was to have a British system without Great Britain that's Murray Rothbard
and Alexander Hamilton actually labeled this system,
the American system.
How's that for Orwellian double talk?
He wanted a clone of the British mercantilist system
that the revolution had just been fought against
and he wanted to call it the American system.
And so if you break this down, what did they want?
A centralized state where political power
was totally centered in the federal government,
heavy federal taxes and debts, discriminatory taxes,
high tariffs would be a discriminatory tax,
and the original constitution prohibited
discriminatory taxation altogether.
They wanted corporate welfare, run amok, essentially,
and aggressive militarism.
Does any of that sound familiar to anybody?
What country might you describe
that is characterized today by these things
that you might be familiar with?
Of course, that's our system today.
And so I would argue that that was why the Constitution
had to be destroyed because the Constitution did not,
neither did the Articles of Confederation,
certainly create a highly centralized state
with heavy federal taxes and debt, discriminatory taxes,
corporate welfare run amok, and aggressive militarism.
That was not the system.
So a very long, decades-long campaign or crusade
had to be waged in a lot of different areas,
in the courts and politics and elsewhere
to destroy the Constitution so that this would be allowed,
so this would come into being.
And at the beginning of the American Republic,
the proponents of this, of course, were the Hamiltonians,
Hamilton himself, people such as Chief Justice John Marshall,
Justice Joseph Story, a Supreme Court Justice,
Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln.
and those were the nationalists up until the Civil War era.
The opponents of all this were the Jeffersonians,
Jefferson himself, Madison, Monroe, Andrew Jackson,
President John Tyler and people of that sort.
And there was a very large battle that went on, okay?
And so you have to understand a little bit
of the history of this in that Hamilton himself,
when he attended the Constitutional Convention,
he did propose a permanent president
who would appoint all the governors.
So this was the first salvo in this decade long political battle to essentially achieve
a centralized monopolistic state.
And the centralized monopolistic state was always tied to an economic agenda.
It was tied to that economic agenda that I just mentioned, the so-called American system.
And so that's what Hamilton did.
He laid out his plan of a permanent president who would appoint all the governors who would
have veto power over all state legislation.
and that would have been identical to England.
They just fought a revolution against that.
Of course they didn't win, they didn't win that.
There was a Senator from Virginia at the time
named John Taylor who smoked these people out.
He wrote a great little book
that has recently been republished
and is based on the notes taken
at the Constitutional Convention by Robert Yates
who was the Chief Justice of New York at the time
who attended the Constitutional Convention.
These men swore to secrecy at the Constitutional Convention, and that should have been a big
giant rat.
For those of you familiar with the labor union antics, you might know that whenever there's
a company that is bidding for contracts and is using non-union labor, labor unions often
show up with a pickup truck with a gigantic inflated rat in the back of the pickup truck
that's about 30 feet high.
I don't know if you've ever seen this, because they call the non-union workers rats.
The cats should have been sitting outside of the convention hall in Philadelphia when they worked up the constitution because they swore themselves to secrecy and you know, whenever you get a bunch of politicians in a room swearing themselves to secrecy, you know you should smell a big fat rat and so, but the rat was exposed maybe 20 or 30 years after the actual event in the form of James Madison's notes which were eventually published and also the notes by Robert Yates who his wife published after his death.
in the 1820s, but here's what John Taylor, Senator John Taylor of Virginia said about
what was going on at the time.
He said, what was being proposed was a national government nearly conforming to that of England.
By Colonel Hamilton's project, the states were fairly and openly to be restored to the
rank of provinces and to be made as dependent upon a supreme national government as they
had been upon a supreme British government.
And so the Jeffersonians were saying, wait a minute, we just fought a revolution against
this system.
Why would we want this?
And of course, the reason why they wanted it is the same reason why the King of England
wanted it.
He enriched himself and his friends with it at the expense of everybody else, but it was
a way to enrich the politically connected and the elite, you know, who supported the
government.
And of course, when Hamilton and his cronies did not get their way, Hamilton himself denounced
the Constitution as a Frail and Worthless Fabric.
Here's another thing that John Taylor noted in his book.
He said, the convention attendees view the Constitution
as a compact among the free and independent states
and not the creation of a national government.
It was proposed and seconded to erase the word national,
so somebody did propose this,
and substitute the words United States in the plural
in the Fourth Resolution, which passed in the affirmative.
Thus, we see an opinion expressed
at the Constitutional Convention
that the phrase, quote, United States,
did not mean a consolidated American people or nation,
and all the inferences in favor of a national government
are overthrown.
In all the founding documents, by the way,
the words United States are always in the plural,
meaning the free, independent and sovereign states
are united in creating a compact or a confederacy to achieve certain ends.
There was no such idea of something called the United States government, the monolithic
Leviathan that exists in Washington D.C. today.
So Taylor also, as I said, smoked these people out in terms of their economic agenda.
He said their intent was to create, and I'm quoting again, quote, monarchy and its handmaiden
Consolidation, and its other handmaiden, Ambition, and a national government dressed up in popular guises such as national splendor and national strength.
So these were the original neocons. They talked about national splendor. I can imagine Bill Kristol writing an article for the Weekly Standard or even a novel, National Splendor in the Grass, or something like that.
The Neocons got their start in the 90s with Crystal and David Brooks writing an article
in the Wall Street Journal called National Greatness Conservatism.
So it's basically the same idea.
I think in that article they proposed doing something like building a tunnel under the
Atlantic Ocean to England.
They said now that the Cold War is over, we need to get the government to do something
really, really, really big, like build a tunnel under the ocean to Europe, although today
Today they would probably change their minds about that. They would fear that terrorists
would come through the tunnel and nuke Americans. Now Taylor also knew, he understood, and it
wasn't just John Taylor, it was all the Jeffersonians, they understood that this push for a monopoly
government where all power is centered in the nation's capital was always tied to the
economic agenda. And the economic agenda is sort of an example of early day Krugmanisms.
In other words, it was convoluted, ass-backwards economics of the sort that you would read
in a typical Paul Krugman New York Times column.
Here's what John Taylor wrote in 1823 about what these people were up to.
He's saying he's mocking their economic arguments.
He's saying here's what they're saying.
They're saying this, quote, I'm quoting John Taylor, the greater the government revenue,
the richer are the people, so the more they tax you, the richer you are.
That frugality in the government is an evil thing, but in the people it's a good thing.
So the more of your money you give the government, and the more you let the government spend,
that's a good thing.
That monopolies and exclusive privileges promote the general welfare, that a division of sovereignty
will raise up a class of wicked, intriguing, self-interested politicians in the states,
But that human nature will be cleansed of these propensities by a sovereignty consolidated
in one government in the nation's capital.
So the state politicians are wicked and evil, but the ones in the faraway capital, where
the citizens have no control over, they're saints.
And he was right about every part of this.
And you have to understand that the battle over the Constitution at the time was between
Jefferson, who saw the document as something that would bind government in change.
His famous phrase was, government needs to be bound by the change of the Constitution.
The Hamiltonians, totally the opposite.
They saw this document as, if it was properly interpreted by clever lawyers like themselves,
as a potential rubber stamp on anything the government would ever do.
As long as you could get enough government judges on the Supreme Court who are like-minded
to go along with rubber-stamping everything, then it could be a useful document.
And one of the historians of Hamilton, a biographer of Hamilton, said this of him.
He said, it seems certain that Hamilton, had he had his way, would have affixed a certain
certificate of constitutionality to every last tax.
Clinton took a large view of the power of Congress to tax, because he took a large view
of the power to spend, and that of course is where we are today.
That statistic I mentioned from Judge Napolitano, that the Supreme Court did not declare a single
law of any kind unconstitutional from 1937 to 1995, that's the Hamiltonian system,
rubber stamp, big government.
And Clinton Rossiter, the biographer of Hamilton, said this of him, he said, having failed to
persuade his colleagues at the Philadelphia Convention of the beauties of a truly national
plan of government, and he's not being sarcastic, Rossiter was a Hamiltonian, and having thereafter
recognized the futility of persuading the legislatures of three-fourths of the states
to surrender even a jot of their privileges, he set out to remold the Constitution into
to an instrument of national supremacy.
So in other words, as soon as they lost the political battle
at the Constitutional Convention,
they set out to reinterpret the Constitution
so that the proper interpretation would be
that it created a highly centralized government
with dictatorial powers, with heavy taxes,
heavy debt, corporate welfare, aggressive militarism,
and all these things that the nationalists always wanted.
So through subterfuge, through lawyerly subterfuge,
Hamilton himself started rewriting the history of the American founding by saying that the states were, in 1787 he said this, the states were merely artificial beings and were never sovereign, he said the nation, not the states, was sovereign, and so you know the way in which the Constitution was adopted was each state held a political convention and each state held a political convention and each state held a political convention and each state held a political convention.
and they voted up or down to ratify or not if you ever read article seven of
the US Constitution it explains how the Constitution is to become the law of the
land the states would ratify and go in or out and of course there are several
states like Rhode Island that's in North Carolina that stayed out after this
Constitution was actually in effect for a year year and a half and it took them
a while to change their mind and during that time there was no proposal that I
I know of, or that anybody knows of, I think, to invade New England, Rhode Island, bomb
Providence and Newport into a smoldering ruins and murder their citizens by the thousands
and sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic while they're doing it.
It was seen as being a voluntary union, not a union that was, as Murray Rothbard once
described it, as a Venus flytrap from which there would never be any escape.
That was not the idea, they had just fought a revolution against that kind of system in their minds.
And so Hamilton invented the lie that the states were never sovereign.
And then he invented the myth of implied powers of the Constitution.
And that really was the beginning of the end, wasn't it?
When you had the Secretary of the Treasury, someone in that kind of a position, the sort
of early-day Goldman Sachs former CEO type thing.
And that is really not an exaggeration.
The way in which Hamilton became the first treasury secretary
is described in this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography
of Hamilton by Ron Chernow.
And he knew really nearly nothing
about economics or finance.
But at the very end of the revolution,
he knew that some very influential and wealthy people
in Philadelphia who wanted to essentially run the government
and so he wrote them letters and pretty much saying,
I agree with you that we need a centralized government
with a central bank modeled after the Bank of England
and high protective tariffs and subsidies
for corporations pretty much.
And these people got him put in as Secretary of Treasury.
They wrote George Washington and recommended Hamilton.
So he really was sort of a water carrier
for the Goldman Sachs of the day as Treasury Secretary,
even though he admittedly knew next to nothing
about Finance himself.
His defenders, like Ron Chernow, by the way,
talk about funny passages like Bob Murphy read to you
in his speech.
If you read through this, you don't read any evidence
that Hamilton ever read something like The Wealth of Nations
by Adam Smith or anything like that.
They keep saying over and over again, well, as a young man,
as a teenager, he worked as a clerk in a molasses trading
company on the island of St. Troy.
That is somehow supposed to make him an economic genius, because he worked for some businessmen, slave-owning businessmen, by the way, in St. Croix.
That's like saying, why should I send my son to Harvard? I'll get him a job at McDonald's instead, and he'll become an economic genius, like Alexander Hamilton did.
If Hamilton can do it, why can't he? So he invented the idea of implied powers.
He also was the first to invent the expansive interpretations of the general welfare and commerce clauses of the Constitution to interpret the general welfare clause to mean just about anything the government would ever do.
And so it was Hamilton who really laid the template for how to destroy the Constitution.
And he had a lot of devoted followers, the most important of which right after him was John Marshall, the Chief Justice from, I think, you know, he was appointed at the very, very end of the Adams administration.
Jefferson became president in March of 1801 and John Adams became, John Marshall became
Chief Justice for I think 36 years and he was very very devoted to the Hamiltonian agenda
and I guess he's most closely associated with the famous Marbury versus Madison decision
that planted into place the idea of judicial review of federal legislation.
The Constitution makes no mention of this, there's no judicial review in the Constitution.
This was John Marshall's idea that he, John Marshall, should be the final arbiter of what
is and is not constitutional, and so he got away with it.
But Jefferson himself, here's what Jefferson said about this, he says, when he was asked
about it, he said, this was in 1819, Thomas Jefferson said, well, my construction or my
understanding of the Constitution is that each department, that is each branch of government,
is truly independent of the others.
And he's saying, wait a minute,
we have three branches of government, not one, not one,
and has an equal right to decide for itself
what is the meaning of the Constitution
in the cases submitted to its action.
So the Jeffersonian view was that, okay,
the Supreme Court can tell us their opinion,
but their opinion is no more important
than the opinion of the President or the Congress
or the people of the states.
Jefferson considered the 10th Amendment
to be the cornerstone of the entire document
and the Constitution, and that means the powers that are not delegated to the federal government
are all reserved to the people and the states respectively.
And they should also have an equal say on what is and is not constitutional.
The Jeffersonians thought it was insanity to allow everyone's liberty to be in the
hands of five government lawyers given lifetime tenure.
Well they have fought a revolution in the name of liberty and then put everybody's liberty
in the hands of five government lawyers with lifetime tenure, that's the system we have,
that's the nationalist argument, and it's the system we have now, but that was never
the intent.
And so what did Marshall do?
Well, one of the things, I'll give you a few examples of some of the other bad things
Marshall did.
In a case called Martin v. Hunter's Leasee, Marshall invented out of thin air the notion
that the federal government had the right to veto state court decisions.
So the federal government essentially took over state court decisions.
He also invented out of thin air the idea that the so-called Supremacy Clause of the
U.S. Constitution makes the federal government supreme over everything the state and local
governments do.
It did not.
All it did was to say that those things that are in Article I, Section 8, those are the
prerogatives of the federal government, that the federal government is supreme only in
those things.
Everything else is left up to the states and the people respectively under the 10th Amendment.
But the nationalists have always used this word supremacy and supreme law of the land
out of context.
They have argued that, well, this gives us sort of a Soviet-style government, centralized
government, not an American-style government.
But John Taylor, again, he wrote about this in his book based on Robert Bates' notes
on the Constitutional Convention.
He said this, the expression in the Constitution, quote,
shall be the supreme law of the land, unquote,
is restricted by its limitations and reservations
and did not convey any species of supremacy
to the government going beyond the powers
delegated or those reserved.
So it's only those primarily foreign policy and war-making
powers that are in Article I, Section 8, that applies.
Marshall repeated the bogus theory
of the American founding, claiming
In the name of the people, the federal government claimed the right to legitimately control
All Individuals or Governments within the American Territory
Think about that, here's the Chief Justice saying that the Federal Government of Washington
can legitimately control all individuals, everything you do, and all governments within
the American Territory.
That was a totalitarian statement if ever there was one, and that was John Marshall.
That's why there's a very good book that ranks the presidents called Recarving Rushmore
by Ivan Eland, published by the Independent Institute and it ranks the presidents. You know,
the historians who write these books that rank presidents, they usually have at the top,
whatever president is involved in killing the most people, blowing up the most buildings,
and spending the most money. That's why FDR, Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, they're always way up
there at the top. But Ivan Eland took a unique approach and he said, well, which presidents did
the best job in defending the constitutional liberties of Americans.
Let's rank him according to that.
He puts John Adams way down near the dead bottom, and the main reason he gave is he
appointed John Marshall Chief Justice of the United States.
So he repeated that.
And the subversion continued for many decades.
This is when you get into the 1830s here when John Marshall was still the Chief Justice.
And the two other big shots in this endeavor through the court system and through politics
to create a centralized unconstitutional government were Joseph Story and Daniel Webster.
Joseph Story was a Supreme Court justice.
He wrote a famous book called Commentaries on the Constitution.
Clinton Rossiter, the Cornell historian, says in one of his books that it should have been
called Commentaries on Alexander Hamilton's Commentaries on the Constitution.
And this pretty much laid out the legalistic groundwork for subverting the Constitution
and claiming that America was a consolidated monopoly government and not the decentralized
system of government that was actually created by the Constitution.
And here's what Rossiter says, and he says this by praising, you know, he says this positively,
he says, stories commentaries provided a political roadmap for the legal professions elite or
or at least among the part of it's educated in the North,
during the middle years of the 19th century.
So it's a political roadmap for monopoly government.
And it was very popular in the North,
but not so much in the South.
And there always was a North-South dichotomy here,
although there were Jeffersonians from the North
and there were nationalists in the South.
For the most part, most of these nationalists came
from New England, New York, Philadelphia,
and the associated business interests
Some of the other things Story said, he essentially laid the ideological groundwork for the destruction
of federalism in America.
He claimed, I'll just mention a few of the things that are in this book, I don't have
that much time.
He claimed that, this was in the 1820s when he was writing this, secession of a single
state would mean, quote, dissolution of the government.
Well, when the southern states did secede in 1860, 1861, the federal government responded
by creating the largest army in the history of the world up to that time for four years.
That was hardly the dissolution of the government, so it wouldn't mean the dissolution of the
government. In fact, just the opposite was proven to happen. Story says this, he said,
the original compact of society in no instance has ever been formally expressed at the first
It's really a myth that people ever got together and formed a state to be some sort of peaceful, benevolent organization that would benefit everyone.
That's a social contract theory. It's a theory, but it was never reality anywhere.
In academe, there's something called the conquest theory of the state that goes back hundreds of years.
It says the origins of every state is really based on one group conquering another and exploiting that other group.
Group. That's the origins of every state. And this is what Joseph's story is saying here, and as he's
recognizing this, that the social compact theories are really just theories designed sort of to get
the public to acquiesce in what the state does. And then he goes on to say, however, even though
the citizens never really agreed to obey everything the state does, he says still, quote, every part
of the Society should pay obedience to the will of the whole, and who is to define the
will of the whole?
Well, not the people, they don't have to have anything to do with it.
It's the politicians, Joseph Story said, the political rulers.
They'll decide for us what the will of the whole is.
This is the French Jacobin philosophy that animated the French Revolution, not the American
Revolution.
The idea that there exists such a thing as the will of the people, the general will,
but that idea of that general will is in the minds of the ruling class, it's not created
by any sort of plebiscite or vote or even opinion poll, the ruling class will tell us
what the general will is and that we therefore have no right to disobey that will.
Felix Morley, one of the old right conservatives of the 1950s wrote about this, he said, you
You know, if you believe in this idea of a general will, as the Nationalists did, like
Joseph Story, he said, quote, no aspect of life is excluded from the control of the general
will.
And whoever refuses to obey the general will must, in that instance, be restrained by the
body politic, which actually means that he is forced to be free.
So you're going to be forced to be free, okay?
Felix Morley, another mid-19th century, 20th century conservative, he said he noted in
in one of his books that the Jeffersonians hated and feared this philosophy for, quote,
if the general will were to become a political reality, then all voluntary associations would
be subject to totalitarian control in the name of the whole people and their will.
So whenever you hear somebody giving a political speech and uses this phrase, the whole people,
if they talk about the founding of the Constitution, reach for your firearm, or at least go to
The majority must have a right to accomplish its objective by the means which they deem
adequate for the ends.
The will of the majority of the people is absolute and sovereign, and it is limited
only by its means and power to make its will effectual.
So politicians will make up for us what they say our will is in the name of the majority.
And then there are no limits to what they can do, he's saying.
There should be no limits to what the government can do in the name of the will of the majority.
The only limits are, quote, its means and power to make its will effectual.
In other words, the barrel of a gun.
How many guns do they have to force us to obey their version of our will?
That's what he's saying.
This is what really laid the groundwork for Abraham Lincoln and the invasion of his own
country.
So, ladies and gentlemen, when you go to vote, what you're really doing is you're adding
credibility to this idea that the will of the people have spoken and you're telling
our rulers, go ahead, keep doing it to us because the people have spoken, you won the
majority rule vote, good luck.
If you want to hear more about this, one of my articles on lewrockwell.com is entitled
be patriotic, don't vote, and this is one of the reasons why.
So if government does become tyrannical, what should we do?
Joseph's story said, well, we should rely on the proper tribunals constituted by the government.
Vote, go ahead and vote if you have a problem with what they're doing.
He repeated the fable that the supremacy clause creates a monopoly government.
He also repeated the whole people lie about the origins of the Constitution, and of course,
probably the most famous lie he said was that the preamble of the Constitution uses the words,
we the people, and so the nationalists to this day refer to that as saying, well, it doesn't say we
the people, so didn't the Constitution create a government created by the whole people? Well,
no, the original version of the Constitution, in the original version, the preamble said this,
We the people of the states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Providence, Plantations, Connecticut,
named all the states individually until somebody said, well, wait a minute, we don't know that every state is going to ratify.
How can we put in a document every state listed? What if Connecticut says no thanks?
They shouldn't be listed in the document. They're not a part of the United States, so they just left it as we the people.
That's what actually happened, and it's been lied about ever since.
But of course, Madison himself, James Madison, in the Federalist Papers, number 39, explained
how the Constitution is to be ratified, not by the whole people.
He says, it says this, not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing
the distinct and independent states to which they respectively belong.
And so it doesn't take a lot of searching to find out how the Constitution was ratified.
Daniel Webster was another one, a famous nationalist, who carried this argument further.
And he, of course, he was in a famous debate over the nature of the union with Robert Haynes,
Senator Robert Haynes of South Carolina in 1830.
And he says this, the Constitution of the United States confers on the government itself
the power of deciding ultimately and conclusively upon the extent of its own authority.
So could you imagine that the founding fathers would have given the government in Washington,
The Constitution never could have designed to destroy liberty by investing five or six men, installed for life, with the power of regulating the Constitution.
The Constitutional Rights of All Political Departments
That just never happened.
But Daniel Webster used his authority to say that.
And he went on and on and on in this debate about the people, the people, the people, the whole people.
Here's one of his statements in this debate.
He says, It is, sir, the people's constitution, the people's government, made for the people, made by the people and answerable to the people.
The people of the United States have declared this constitution shall be the supreme law.
of the Supreme Law.
So that was two big lies that the whole people adopted the Constitution and they created a
supremacy clause that makes it the Supreme Law.
And this is, by the way, is where Abraham Lincoln plagiarized and is famous of the people,
by the people, for the people speech in the Kettysburg Address, it came from Webster.
He was a devotee of the story, Hamilton's story, Webster play, view of politics.
And then Webster asked, well, he talked also about the general will.
And he was more forthright than the story was.
He asked in this debate, well, who shall interpret the people's will?
And his answer is, and I quote, the government itself, of course, not the people.
The people shouldn't have anything to do with it.
Okay.
And so this is what happened.
We had this long battle in the courts and in public opinion and in politics over the
nature of the union.
And that battle finally ended in the 1860s when the nationalists quit arguing.
They just gave up arguing and grabbed firearms instead.
And that was finally ended, that argument was finally ended by the Civil War, so-called.
And so after the Civil War, there was no more talk of decentralized government put into
place by states' rights or the right of nullification or the right of secession.
The argument ended, okay?
And so they didn't win this battle through legal means, or through public opinion, or
through political elections.
The South dominated the political elections, the big majority of American presidents up
to the Civil War were from the South and were Jeffersonians, you know, opposed all of this.
And so I'm going to close with a quote from Murray Rothbard, since I started with a quote
from Murray Rothbard, and this is a book that I think is probably for sale out front.
It's called Strictly Confidential, The Private Volcker Fund Memoes of Murray Rothbard.
And this is on page 131, where Murray Rothbard is talking about the consequences of the Civil
War.
And you might remember my title.
My title is Why the Constitution Had to be Destroyed and How They Did It.
And so this is why the Constitution had to be destroyed.
Murray Rothbard hit the nail on the head in this quote, which I'm going to read to you.
It's kind of a long quote, but it really just says it all, I think.
So this is why the Constitution had to be destroyed in my view, and probably also Murray's
view if he was still around.
He said, and I'm quoting, it is the major of the status consequences of the Civil War
that America never recovered from it.
And of course Murray is writing in full knowledge that all the other countries of the world
ended slavery peacefully, that ended slavery, the British, the French, the Dutch, the Danes,
everybody, New Yorkers, read the book Slavery in New York if you want to know how New Yorkers
Ended Slavery by the 1850s. There were no wars involved there. And then he goes on to say,
Hamiltonian neo-federalism, beyond the wildest dreams of even a John Quincy Adams, had either
been foisted permanently on America or had been inaugurated to be later fulfilled. Let us trace
the leading consequences of the war against the South. There is first the enormous toll of death,
injury and destruction. There's a complete setting aside of the civilized rules of war
that Western civilization had laboriously been erecting for centuries.
Instead, a total war against the civilian population was launched against the South.
The symbol of this barbaric and savage oppression was of course Sherman's march
through Georgia and the rest of the South, the burning of Atlanta, etc.
He says, further, the Civil War foisted upon the country the elimination of Jacksonian hard money.
The Greenbacks established government fiat paper, which it took 14 long years to tame,
and the National Bank Act ended the separation of government from banking,
effectively quasi-nationalizing and regulating the banking system and creating an engine of
governmentally sponsored inflation. So ruthlessly did the Lincoln administration overturn the old
banking system that it became almost impossible to achieve a return. Impossible, that is, without
a radical and almost revolutionary will for hard money, which did not exist. On the tariff, the
The virtual destruction of the Democratic Party led to the foisting of a high protective tariff
to remain for a generation.
In fact, the average tariff rate was about 45% and remained there until 1913 when the
income tax came in.
Continuing on with Rothbard, indeed, permanently for the old pre-war low tariff was never to
return.
It was behind this wall of tariff subsidy that the trusts were able to form.
Further, the administration embarked on a vast program of subsidies to favored businesses,
and grants to railroads, etc. The post office was later monopolized and private postal services
outlawed. The national debt skyrocketed. The budget increased greatly and permanently and
taxes increased greatly, including the first permanent foisting on America of excise taxation,
especially on whiskey and tobacco. Go ahead and boo if you want to boo the whiskey and
tobacco. So he says, thus on every point of the old Federalist wig versus Democrat-Republican
and Controversy. He means Hamiltonian versus Jeffersonian. The Civil War and the Lincoln
administration achieved a neo-Federalist triumph that was complete right down the line. But
that's not all. They had their version of the Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization
Act also in those days. Rothbard describes it this way. But this was not all. The Civil
War saw also the inauguration of despotic and dictatorial methods beyond the dreams
of the so-called despots of 98, militarism rand rampant with the arrogant suspension of habeas corpus,
the crushing and mass arrests in Maryland, Kentucky, etc., the suppression of civil liberties
and opposition against the war. Sound familiar? Among the peace copperheads, the persecution of
Congressman Volandegam, who was exiled, and the institution of conscription. And then he goes on
I want to say, here's the final thing, almost everything in short, that is currently evil on the American political scene, had its roots and its beginnings in the Civil War, and that was Murray Rothbard, and none of this, as I said at the beginning, was constitutional under the original Constitution, that's why we had to have this long political and legal war that ended up in a shooting war to finally destroy the Constitution and create a monolithic centralized monopoly government in Washington D.C.,
which we have slaved ever since, and I guess my time is up, now I'm going to be able to brag that I had a standing ovation because it's time for you all to stand and go to lunch, okay?