Lincolnomics | City Journal
We live now in an economy where it often seems that few people see Lincolnian independence as their goal our society is one of permanent wage earners, living paycheck to paycheck, with educations almost entirely geared to training them to work for someone or something other than themselves. It is often an economy, too, where government sees itself more as a restrainer of economic independence than an enabler of it. Yet we have not drifted so far from Lincoln s horizons that his economics have lost all possibility of realization. More than 30 million small businesses operate in America, as opposed to just 18,500 large ones (large, in this case, meaning 500 or more employees), and of those 30 million, an astonishing 73 percent are sole proprietorships. Even after a century and half, we re not as far removed as we think from the free laborer Lincoln described, who saved means to buy land of his own, a shop of his own, and to increase his property. This, Abraham Lincoln believed, was the true, genuine principle of free labor . . . and so it may go on and on in one ceaseless round so long as man exists on the face of the earth!
Lincoln was no Marxist. I’m skeptical of his seemingly Hamiltonian ideas about internal improvements however.