When former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke got wind of the fact that the U.S.
Treasury Department was considering replacing Alexander Hamilton on the
ten-dollar bill he threw a fit of protest. Writing on his Brookings
Institution blog, Bernanke said that he was “appalled” that “the greatest of
the founding fathers” (and the founding father of central banking) would be
mistreated in this way.
The New York Times immediately weighed in, apparently outraged
that such a famous New Yorker would ever be demoted in such a way. The
neocons were especially incensed over the proposal. After all, David
Brooks of the New York Times has claimed that Hamilton
single-handedly “created” American capitalism all by himself with help from
no one, not even God Himself.
Pat Buchanan, who once said to me that “Hamilton is my hero,” must have
lost a lot of sleep over it as well. Around the same time, New Yorkers
began flocking to a new Broadway musical named “Hamilton” that repeats the
old statist tale about how allegedly wonderful the statist/imperialist
Hamilton was compared to the strict constructionist, “that government is best
which governs least,” Thomas Jefferson.
The establishment adores Hamilton (and hates Jefferson) because Hamilton
was a consummate statist and imperialist. He persistently denounced his
nemesis Jefferson for his “excessive concern for liberty.” When
President Jefferson announced in his first inaugural address that his
foreign policy would be “honest friendship with all nations, entangling
alliances with none,” and that “A wise and frugal Government, which shall
restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to
regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take
from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of
good government . . .”, Hamilton denounced it as “the symptom of a pygmy
mind.” Hamilton wanted a more centrally-planned and
government-subsidized and supervised economy, and was itching to start a war
with France in the name of what he called “imperial glory.”
When the constitutional convention quickly discarded Hamilton’s proposal
of a permanent president (i.e., a king) who would appoint all the state
governors who would have veto power over all state legislation, effectively
destroying any semblance of federalism, Hamilton loudly denounced the
Constitution as “a frail and worthless fabric.”
Hamilton’s objective was “to build the foundations of a new empire,” wrote
Hamilton biographer Clinton Rossiter. Just like the British empire,
against which the American Revolution had just been fought. Hamilton
“had perhaps the highest respect for the government of any important American
political thinker who ever lived,” wrote Rossiter. No wonder the government
establishment has always been “in love” with Hamilton.
Hamilton was the founding father of constitutional subversion, having
literally invented the “implied powers of the constitution” scam during his
debate with Jefferson over the constitutionality of a national bank.
(He was for it; Jefferson opposed it). Of course, once it is conceded
that there might be “implied” as opposed to explicit, delegated powers of the
federal government, you are on the road to unlimited government, which is the
road that Hamilton favored. “With the aid of the doctrine of
implied powers,” Clinton Rossiter boasted, Hamilton “converted the powers
enumerated in Article 1, Section 8 into foundations for whatever prodigious
feats of legislation any future Congress might contemplate.” The
“living constitution” was born. No wonder the establishment loves
Hamilton.
With such lawyerly subterfuge, Hamilton hoped to “affix a certain
certificate of constitutionality to every last tax,” said Rossiter. “Hamilton
took a large view of the power of Congress to tax because he took a large
view of the power to spend.”
His view of the Constitution was the exact opposite of Jefferson’s.
With Jefferson, the government should be “bound by the chains of the
Constitution.” To Hamilton, the Constitution could and should be used
as a rubber stamp on anything the federal government ever
proposed to do. This, in fact, is the kind of Constitution that
Americans have slaved under now for several generations.
Hamilton harbored the bloody impulse to literally murder tax dissenters
and anyone who challenged the “authority” of the federal government, as was
proven by his behavior during the Pennsylvania Whiskey Rebellion. This
impulse would eventually become the defining characteristic of the federal
government during the Lincoln regime, with Lincoln being the political son of
Alexander Hamilton.
When Pennsylvania farmers began fermenting grain into whiskey and
protested Treasury Secretary Hamilton’s new whiskey tax as discriminatory,
Hamilton persuaded George Washington to ask governors along the eastern
seaboard to conscript 15,000 men to march into Western Pennsylvania to quell
the protest. They captured several dozen leaders of the tax protest
movement and marched them across the state barefoot in the winter and put
them on “trial” in Philadelphia, with Hamilton posing as the “judge.”
Hamilton wanted to hang all of them to teach all other taxpayers a lesson,
but George Washington introduced a dose of sanity to the whole affair by
pardoning all of them, to Hamilton’s everlasting dismay. No wonder the
establishment loves and adores Hamilton.
Hamilton was the political water boy for the crony capitalist
one-percenters of his day. All of his efforts to create a bank run by
politicians out of the nation’s capital (the First Bank of the United States)
had one main purpose: to provide cheap credit for his big business political
patrons in New York and Philadelphia, and to subsidize the banking industry
itself, at the expense of the general public.
Hamilton was a protectionist who repeated all the silly slogans of the
British mercantilists. He wanted to bring the rotten, corrupt, British
system of “mercantilism,” against which the Revolution had been fought, to
America, run by Americans like himself and his New York political
cronies. He mocked the free-trade views of his British contemporary,
Adam Smith, the French physiocrats, and almost all other economic scholars of
his day as he advocated ripping off the common man for the benefit, once
again, of his big business political patrons who wanted to be protected from
international competition. (As John C. Calhoun once said, what the
public is “protected” from with protectionism is low prices for
goods).
As though that weren’t enough pandering for the benefit of the founding
one percenters, Hamilton also championed direct corporate welfare in the form
of taxpayer subsidies for all kinds of businesses and industries in his
famous Report on Manufactures. It was called the “infant industry
argument” for corporate welfare, but of course, because America was a young
country, ALL industries could be labeled “infant” industries! He just
did not believe that commerce could succeed without his guiding hand.
Hamilton championed the biggest corporate welfare subsidies for the road-
and canal-building corporations even though thousands of miles of roads had
been built by private companies with private capital by the early
1800s. Just in case tax revenues weren’t enough to cover all these blatantly
unconstitutional expenditures that appear nowhere in Article 1,
Section 8 of the Constitution, Hamilton waxed eloquently about how the public
debt could be “a public blessing.”
Hamilton’s argument for the “blessing” of a large public debt was quite
Machiavellian. His theory was that because the wealthier people of the
country would be the owners of the debt (i.e., government bonds), they would
form a formidable lobbying power for higher taxes and bigger and more
centralized government to assure that their bonds would always be paid
off. As William Graham Sumner wrote in his biography of Hamilton, he
wanted a large national debt because of “its tendency to strengthen our . . .
government by increasing the number of ligaments between the government and
interests of individuals.” Rich and politically-influential
individuals, that is. And as Douglas Adair, an editor of The
Federalist Papers, wrote in the introduction to one edition of the
publication:
With devious brilliance, Hamilton set out, by a program of
class legislation, to unite the propertied interests of the
eastern seaboard into a cohesive administration party, while at the same time
he attempted to make the executive dominant over the Congress by a lavish use
of the spoils system . . . . Hamilton transformed every financial
transaction of the Treasury Department into an orgy of speculation and graft
in which selected senators, congressmen, and certain of their richer
constituents throughout the nation participated.
Is there any wonder why the “establishment” of “senators, congressmen, and
richer constituents throughout the nation” today are so
worshipful of Hamilton and so relieved that his mug shot remains on the
ten-dollar bill?
The Best of
Thomas DiLorenzo
