Neo-Confederate Economist at Ron Paul’s Fed Hearing

Texas Rep. Ron Paul intended his first hearing as chair of a House subcommittee to showcase one of his complaints about the Federal Reserve–that central planning of the money supply makes unemployment worse, by creating booms that inevitably lead to recessions worse than would otherwise occur.

The hearing did do that. But that was overshadowed somewhat when Democrats noted that Paul’s star witnesses, Thomas DiLorenzo, an economist at Loyola University in Baltimore, has called Abraham Lincoln a “dictator” and “mass murderer”–and has links to a neo-Confederate group called League of the South.

The League seeks a Southern breakaway nation led by “European-Americans.”

To hear DiLorenzo tell it, linking him to the League is defamation. His only connection, he told the DMN, is that he lectured to some League members “15 years ago” at the invitation of an Emory University professor, and didn’t even realize they were League members. He did concede, though, that he sympathizes with anyone who wants to secede from a government they disagree with, be they Southerners in the USA or Soviet Republics under the USSR.

His dismissal of any substantive link don’t square with material collected by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which views the League as a hate group.

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