Folks, welcome back to Cross Politics.

I have on our show today with us, Thomas Delorenzo.

Thomas, thank you for joining us.

My pleasure to be with you.

Let me introduce Thomas here. Give a little background on him before we get into our discussion here. Thomas D'Lorenzo is a professor of economics at Loyola University of Maryland and a member of the senior faculty of the Mises Institute.

He's the author of The Real Lincoln, Lincoln

unmasked how capitalism saved America, and Hamilton's curse, how Jefferson's arch

enemy betrayed the American Revolution and what it means for Americans today. Why is the history

of Abe so controversial and why does it, why does it matter today?

Well, you know, one of the things in my book, The Real Lincoln was that, you know,

apart from the whole issue of slavery, that seems the one good thing, of course,

it came from the Civil War, the ending of slavery, but there was also some revolutionary changes in our society.

And one, the whole idea of the founding fathers of decentralized government or federalism, as was called,

was pretty much ended by the civil war because we, the people no longer have the right to nullify what we thought were unconstitutional

federal laws and certainly secession or the threat of secession was eliminated you know by

all the deaths hundreds of thousands of mid-Americans that lost their lives in a civil war.

And so basically, after the civil war, the federal government became the sole arbiter

of what its powers were to be through the Supreme Court.

And before too long, it decided that, well, there really shouldn't be any limits on our powers.

And so the Civil War led to the gigantic, highly centralized bureaucratic state that we've lived under all these years, and it's just gotten worse and worse and more and more isolated

from the people.

And then the second thing that happened during the Civil War was, you know, Lincoln's economic agenda for 25 years before it became president.

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