Hamilton's Curse: How Jefferson's Arch Enemy Betrayed the American Revolution--And What It Means for Americans Today by Thomas Dilorenzo

Author:Thomas Dilorenzo
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: cookie429, General, United States, Extratorrents, Kat, History
ISBN: 9780307449856
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2008-10-21T00:00:00+00:00

Alexander Hamilton was so eager to centrally plan the entire economy that in his Report on Manufactures he got extremely detailed with his proposals, offering specific examples of how to subsidize many different industries, including iron, copper, lead, coal, wood, skins, grain, flax and hemp, cotton, wool, silk, glass, gunpowder, paper, and books. In this regard he was the prototypical government bureaucrat: he felt he had all the answers.

He did not, of course. Actually, he had a very limited understanding of many areas of economics. William Graham Sumner was right when he characterized Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures as marred by “confusion and contradiction.”29 Jefferson, for his part, believed that Hamilton larded his reports with high-sounding rhetoric to intentionally befuddle and confuse the average reader. Jefferson believed that Hamilton “was not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption” (i.e., mercantilism).30 Moreover, he interpreted Hamilton’s “schemes,” as he called them, for public debt, central banking, and subsidies to businesses as “the means by which the corrupt British system of government could be introduced into the United States.”31 He viewed his arguments more as propaganda for the British system than as serious economic analysis. He even wrote to George Washington that Hamilton’s ideas “flowed from principles adverse to liberty” and, if enacted, would subvert “step by step the principles of the constitution.”32

Despite Hamilton’s ambitions to remake the American economy according to the proposals he laid out in the Report on Manufactures, little came of the report initially. When his rival Jefferson became president, it was a clear blow to his efforts to centrally plan the economy. And just three years after Jefferson’s inauguration, Hamilton was dead.

But his economic framework did not die with him. Hamilton’s political heirs would embrace his mercantilist model in the years after his death. In fact, in the decades ahead politicians would arm themselves with Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures, using it as a seemingly authoritative case for government planning of the economy. As William Graham Sumner wrote, the Report “proved a welcome arsenal to the politicians” after the War of 1812.33 An “arsenal” for the accumulation of political power, that is, not for economic development.

THE FORTY-YEAR CAMPAIGN FOR CRONY CAPITALISM

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