Mike Konczal: Why Friends Don't Let Friends Support the Republican Party

Mike Konczal on the kooks whom Ron Paul calls as witnesses:

As for the witnesses, Thomas J. DiLorenzo is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He's got the Lincoln stuff down pat.  He appears to be best known as an author of Lincoln Unmasked: What You're Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe (example, see this interview:

I saw it as my duty to spread the truth about what a horrific tyrant Lincoln was…. I think secession is not only possible but necessary if any part of America is every to be considered "the land of the free" in any meaningful sense.... Lincoln was almost exclusively devoted to Hamiltonian mercantilism — high protectionist tariffs, other forms of corporate welfare, a central bank modeled after the Bank of England to pay for it all, and political patronage and matching politics….The entire agenda of Hamiltonian mercantilism was put into place during the Lincoln administration — along with the first income tax, the first military conscription law, and the creation of the internal revenue bureaucracy, among other monstrosities...

He writes less about the Federal Reserve and monetary policy. He writes about central banking policy at the founding of our country as a debate between Hamilton and Jefferson, but post WWII central banking gets mentioned only as "the Fed and its legalized counterfeiting operations" and that TARP was just like "appointing the US Treasury secretary as the nation's first financial dictator."   This should make for an interesting conversation on monetary policy.

I'm not trying to cherry-pick. You can read his articles at Mises or Lew Rockwell. He has his opinions and arguments...