It’s Time To End Hamilton’s Curse

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo | LewRockwell.com

For more than a century now, Americans have lived in what pundit George Will once called “Hamilton’s Nation.” Will was referring to the fact that government policy has long been primarily guided by the Big Government, interventionist political philosophy of Alexander Hamilton. Liberal writer Michael Lind edited an entire book of essays celebrating this fact entitled Hamilton’s Republic. About every other month or so, neoconservative pundit David Brooks authors another New York Times or Wall Street Journal op-ed urging a “revival” of the Hamiltonian political agenda, as though it needs reviving.

To repudiate Hamilton’s political legacy is, according to Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow, “to repudiate the modern world” itself. Brooks and William Kristol began their crusade for “national greatness conservatism” with a September 15, 1997 Wall Street Journal article that urged Americans to “reinvigorate the nationalism of Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay and Teddy Roosevelt.”

In his book, Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth, historian Stephen F. Knott informs us that Hamilton should be given ALL the credit for “the America that explored the outer reaches of space, welcomed millions of immigrants, led the effort to defeat communism, produced countless technological advances, and abolished slavery and Jim Crow . . .” When Time magazine asked him who his heroes were shortly after the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, House Speaker Newt Gingrich named Hamilton first (followed by John Wayne, Kemal Ataturk, and Father Flanagan).

What most Americans probably know about Hamilton is that he was a founding father, one of the authors of The Federalist Papers, and that his picture is on the ten-dollar bill. But he was much more than that, as the above-mentioned writers surely know. As Jeff Taylor remarked in Where Did the Party Go? William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey, and the Jeffersonian Legacy, “Hamilton, under the influence of the two political theorists most distasteful to Jefferson, Hobbes and Hume, was frankly the champion of the leviathan state.” This is why in my forthcoming book, Hamilton’s Curse, I discard Ron Chernow’s advice about “repudiating the modern world” and explain why Hamilton’s political and economic legacy must be repudiated if America is to ever again be known as the land of the free.

Hamilton’s Curse and the Death of the Dollar Standard

William N. Grigg | Pro Libertate Blog | Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Dick Cheney wasn’t the first Vice President to shoot somebody: Aaron Burr is depicted here shooting and mortally wounding Alexander Hamilton during their 1804 duel in Weehawken, New Jersey, an “affair of honor”, that came a couple of decades too late to save America from a lot of economic misery.

Recalling the death of Alexander Hamilton at the hands of Aaron Burr, one is inevitably prompted to borrow the line from Shakespeare’s Scottish Play: “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.”

After examining the legacy of the first U.S. Treasury Secretary in Thomas DiLorenzo’s timely and indispensable new book Hamilton’s Curse, one might be forgiven for wishing the deadly round fired by Burr’s pistol during the 1804 duel at Weehawken had found its target two decades earlier, or that Hamilton — who displayed genuine valor as an artillery officer in the War for American Independence — had died heroically on the battlefield before laying the foundations of the corporatist system under which we now live.

A worshipful biography of Hamilton published several decades ago bore the title To Covet Honor, a phrase used by the author without irony.

The line from which that title was taken — “If it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul alive” — was uttered by Henry V on the eve of a battle in a war waged in the cruelest fashion on the thinnest of pretexts.

Understood in its context, rather than in the heroic light in which that author hoped to bathe his subject, that phrase actually reflects some elements of Hamilton’s personality and ambitions that led him to betray the American Revolution.

Hamilton, as is widely known, favored a highly centralized government, a near-dictatorial executive, and a mercantilist/corporatist economic system. As DiLorenzo points out (and as we’ll see anon), in the pursuit of his nationalist designs Hamilton had no compunctions about using what Exeter, King Henry’s royal emissary who delivered an ultimatum to the French, called “bloody constraint” against his countrymen who preferred freedom to Hamilton’s concept of “greatness.”

Indeed, Hamilton’s notion of “honor” obtained through bloodshed and coercion wasn’t that different from that of Prince Hal, the “vain, giddy, shallow, humorous youth” who sought to vindicate his kingly stature by waging the first war his advisors could contrive.

Cycles of Doom

NOAM SCHEIBER | nytimes.com | November 30, 2008

Walter Heller, the chairman of President Kennedy’s council of economic advisers.

Robert J. Samuelson is a conservative from a time when conservatism was more a sensibility than an ideology. His business columns in The Washington Post and Newsweek preach old-fashioned virtue on a macroeconomic scale: don’t promise more than you can deliver; weigh the unintended consequences of your actions; beware hucksters bearing easy fixes. Samuelson often directs this advice to government officials ­— his nominal subjects are budget shortfalls, interest rates and energy prices. But his rules are every bit as relevant to daily life as they are to public policy.

It is therefore no surprise that Samuel­son would write a book-length meditation on inflation — that ultimate symbol of cultural rot masquerading as an economic problem. Inflation-racked countries scorn all the self-abnegating rituals that make capitalism work. They want their guns and their butter and they want them now. So they print money to pay for them. By contrast, low-inflation countries are committed to an ethos of scrimping and toiling that yields long-term rewards. In “The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath,” Samuel­son studies the transformation of the United States from the first kind of country to the second.

The villain in Samuelson’s morality tale is a group of intellectuals who came into fashion during World War II, then came into power with the Kennedy administration. John F. Kennedy himself had sound economic instincts. But he was seduced by his chief economic adviser, a University of Minnesota professor named Walter Heller, who argued that more rational management of the economy would produce permanently higher growth. “Heller was an aggressive salesman for what ultimately became known as the ‘new economics,’ ” Samuelson writes, but he was “hardly a one-man band.” Many of the day’s leading economic lights — James Tobin of Yale and Robert Solow and Paul Samuelson (no relation to Robert), both of M.I.T. — held similar views.

The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath

The Past and Future of American Affluence

Written by Robert J. Samuelson

EXCERPT
Chapter 1

The Lost History

I

History is what we say it is. If you asked a group of scholars to name the most important landmarks in the American story of the past half century, they would list some or all of the following: the war in Vietnam; the civil rights movement; the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.; Watergate and President Nixon’s resignation; the sexual revolution; the invention of the computer chip; Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980; the end of the Cold War; the creation of the Internet; the emergence of AIDS; the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; and the two wars in Iraq (1991 and 2003). Looking abroad, these scholars might include other developments: the rise of Japan as a major economic power in the 1970s and 1980s; the emergence of China in the 1980s from its self-imposed isolation; and the spread of nuclear weapons (to China, India, Pakistan and others). But missing from any list would be the rise and fall of double-digit U.S. inflation. This would be a huge oversight.

We have now arrived at the end of a roughly half-century economic cycle dominated by inflation, for good and ill. Its rise and fall constitute one of the great upheavals of our time, though one largely forgotten and misunderstood. From 1960 to 1979, annual U.S. inflation increased from a negligible 1.4 percent to 13.3 percent. By 2001, it had receded to 1.6 percent, almost exactly what it had been in 1960. For this entire period, inflation’s climb and collapse exerted a dominant influence over the economy’s successes and failures and much more. Inflation and its fall shaped, either directly or indirectly, how Americans felt about themselves and their society; how they voted and the nature of their politics; how businesses operated and treated their workers; and how the American economy was connected with the rest of the world. Although no one would claim that inflation’s side effects were the only forces that influenced the nation over these decades, they counted for more than most people including most historians, economists and journalists think. It’s impossible to decipher our era, or to think sensibly about the future, without understanding the Great Inflation and its aftermath.

What Hamilton Has Wrought

Thomas J. DiLorenzo | LewRockwell.com | October 6, 2008

The current economic crisis is the inevitable consequence of what I call Hamilton’s Curse in my new book of that name. It is the legacy of Alexander Hamilton and his political, economic, and constitutional philosophy. As George Will once wrote, Americans are fond of quoting Jefferson, but we live in Hamilton’s country.

The great debate between Hamilton and Jefferson over the purpose of government, which animates American politics to this day, was very much about economic policy. Hamilton was a compulsive statist who wanted to bring the corrupt British mercantilist system – the very system the American Revolution was fought to escape from – to America. He fought fiercely for his program of corporate welfare, protectionist tariffs, public debt, pervasive taxation, and a central bank run by politicians and their appointees out of the nation’s capital.

Jefferson and his followers opposed him every step of the way because they understood that Hamilton’s agenda was totally destructive of liberty. And unlike Hamilton, they took Adam Smith’s warnings against economic interventionism seriously.

Hamilton complained to George Washington that “we need a government of more energy” and expressed disgust over “an excessive concern for liberty in public men” like Jefferson. Hamilton “had perhaps the highest respect for government of any important American political thinker who ever lived,” wrote Hamilton biographer Clinton Rossiter.

Hamilton and his political compatriots, the Federalists, understood that a mercantilist empire is a very bad thing if you are on the paying end, as the colonists were. But if you are on the receiving end, that’s altogether different. It’s good to be the king, as Mel Brooks would say.

Hamilton was neither the inventor of capitalism in America nor “the prophet of the capitalist revolution in America,” as biographer Ron Chernow ludicrously asserts. He was the instigator of “crony capitalism,” or government primarily for the benefit of the well-connected business class. Far from advocating capitalism, Hamilton was “befogged in the mists of mercantilism” according to the great late nineteenth century sociologist William Graham Sumner.

‘The Doves Were Right’

RICHARD HOLBROOKE | NYT | November 28, 2008

McGeorge Bundy, center, and Gen. William Westmoreland, right, view the aftermath of the Vietcong attack on the air base near Pleiku in February 1965.

In 1961, John Fitzgerald Kennedy brought to Washington a new generation of pragmatic young activists who came to be known as the New Frontiersmen. When the journalist Theodore White later wrote a memorable photo essay about them for Life magazine, he called them the “action-intellectuals.”

The most celebrated were Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and McGeorge Bundy, whose title — modest by today’s standards — was special assistant to the president for national security affairs, but whose importance was great (today the position has a more grandiose title — national security adviser). Mc­Namara, of course, became one of the most controversial public servants in modern times, while Bundy got less attention, except for Kai Bird’s excellent 1998 dual biography of him and his ­brother William (who had served as assistant secretary of state for East Asia).

But in “Lessons in Disaster,” Gordon Goldstein’s highly unusual book, Bundy emerges as the most interesting figure in the Vietnam tragedy — less for his unfortunate part in prosecuting the war than for his agonized search 30 years later to understand himself.

Bundy was the quintessential Eastern Establishment Republican, a member of a family that traced its Boston roots back to 1639. His ties to Groton (where he graduated first in his class), Yale and then Harvard were deep. At the age of 27, he wrote, to national acclaim, the ‘memoirs” of former Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. In 1953, Bundy became dean of the faculty at Harvard — an astonishing responsibility for someone still only 34. Even David Halberstam, who would play so important a role in the public demolition of Bundy’s reputation in his classic, “The Best and the Brightest,” admitted that “Bundy was a magnificent dean” who played with the faculty “like a cat with mice.”

As he chose his team, Kennedy was untroubled by Bundy’s Republican roots —the style, the cool and analytical mind, and the Harvard credentials were more important. “I don’t care if the man is a Democrat or an Igorot,” he told the head of his transition team, Clark Clifford. “I just want the best fellow I can get for the particular job.” And so McGeorge Bundy entered into history — the man with the glittering résumé for whom nothing seemed impossible.

Republicans for Hillary!

Ana Marie Cox | The Daily Beast | Nov 23, 2008

Neocons, right-wing scribes, and impeachment managers are in rare agreement with Obama —Clinton is a great choice for Secretary of State.

Hillary Clinton has found some unlikely allies and supporters in her journey to becoming Secretary of State: neoconservatives, contributors to the National Review, even a former manager of her husband’s impeachment proceedings. You might call it a vast right-wing conspiracy.

How to explain the generally positive take Republicans have on Clinton’s nomination? Her willingness to veer right in international policy. While she all but—all but—apologized for her pro-war vote in the Democratic primaries, Republicans are counting on her toughness in the days ahead. As one consultant put it: “We all know that secretly, she’s a hawk.” Writing in The Weekly Standard’s blog, Michael Goldfarb wrote hopefully about Clinton “even present[ing] the case for war with Iran to an insubordinate United Nations in the event that Obama’s personal diplomacy somehow fails to deter the mullahs from their present course.” His editor, Bill Kristol, responded to the news with a giddy email: “I look forward to working with her!”

Clinton-Obama Détente: From Top Rival to Top Aide

Few are predicting that this new relationship born of mutual respect and self-interest will grow into a tight bond between the new president and the woman who will be the public face of his foreign policy, though some say it is not impossible.

By ELISABETH BUMILLER | NYT | Published: November 22, 2008

Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The thaw in the resentful relationship between the most powerful woman in the Democratic Party and her younger male rival began at the party’s convention this summer, when Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton gave such a passionate speech supporting Senator Barack Obama that his top aides leapt out of their chairs backstage to give her a standing ovation as she swept past.

Mr. Obama, who was in the first steps of what would become a strategic courtship, called afterward to thank her. By then, close aides to Mrs. Clinton said, she had come to respect the campaign Mr. Obama had run against her. At the least, she knew he understood like no one else the brutal strains of their epic primary battle.

By this past Thursday, when Mr. Obama reassured Mrs. Clinton that as secretary of state she would have direct access to him and could select her own staff, the wooing was complete.

“She feels like she’s been treated very well in the way she’s been asked,” said a close associate of Mrs. Clinton, who like others interviewed asked for anonymity because the nomination will not be formally announced until after Thanksgiving.

A threat from within: New book describes a century of Jewish opposition to Zionism

Yakov M. Rabkin | April 11, 2006

Do not utterly take the truth away from my mouth, for I have put my hope in Your rules. (Psalms 119:43)

Jewish schools in France and Belgium are torched, synagogues in Turkey and Tunisia are bombed. These are only among the most recent consequences of the festering, century-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But why have these attacks been aimed at targets in the Jewish Diaspora? How can the Hasidic children of Antwerp or Cagny be held responsible for the actions of Israeli soldiers in Jenin or Ramallah?

But what, on the other hand, could be more normal than to associate Jews with the State of Israel? Are not the Jews of the Diaspora often seen as aliens, outsiders or perhaps even Israeli citizens taking a long holiday far from “home”? Such insinuations have always been dear to anti-Semites, for whom a world Jewish conspiracy is an incontrovertible fact. But the linkage of Jews with the State of Israel is also a theme popular with the Zionists, who, ever since the creation of their political movement more than a century ago, have claimed to be the vanguard of the entire Jewish people. Some of them even assert that any threat to the survival of the State of Israel is a threat to the survival of Jews throughout the world. For them, Israel has become not only the guarantor but also the standard-bearer of Judaism.

Reality, in the event, is far more complex.

The scene is downtown Montreal; the occasion, a massive demonstration in commemoration of Israeli Independence Day. On one side of the square, a compact group of Haredim in frock-coats and wide-brimmed black hats brandish placards that proclaim: “Stop Zionism’s Bloody Adventure!”, “The Zionist Dream has Become a Nightmare”, “Zionism is the Opposite of Judaism”. The leaflets they distribute read:

Worse than the toll of suffering, exploitation, death, and desecration of the Torah, has been the inner rot that Zionism has injected into the Jewish soul. It has dug deep into the essence of being a Jew. It has offered a secular formulation of Jewish identity, as a replacement for the unanimous belief of our people in Torah from Heaven. It has caused Jews to view golus [exile] as a result of military weakness. Thus, it has destroyed the Torah view of exile as a punishment for sin. It has wreaked havoc among Jews both in Israel and America, by casting us in the role of Goliath-like oppressors. It has made cruelty and corruption the norm for its followers.

Thus, this, the fifth day of the Jewish month of Iyar, is a day of extraordinary sadness for the Jewish people, and for all men. It will be marked in many Orthodox circles with fasting and mourning and the donning of sackcloth, as a sign of mourning. May we all merit to see the peaceful dismantling of the state and the ushering in of peace, between Muslims and Jews around the world. (Neturei Karta 2001)

The pro-Israel demonstrators accuse them of treason, of not being “real Jews.” Still others attempt to rip the signs from their hands. The riot squad is called in to separate the two Jewish contingents. Similar scenes take place simultaneously in New York, London and Jerusalem.

Such events may be local, but they throw light on a widely spread phenomenon: the rejection of Zionism in the name of the Torah, in the name of Jewish tradition. Such rejection is all the more significant in that it can in no way be described as anti-Semitic, recent attempts to conflate any expression of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism notwithstanding.

How International Bankers Gained Control of America

Money Masters producer on economic meltdown – Interview

The Money Masters – How Bankers Gained Control of America

From a Video Script Produced by Patrick S. J. Carmack

Directed by Bill Still, Royalty Production Company 1998

[QUOTE]
One month after the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, the first shots of the American Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina on April 12,1861. …

Certainly slavery was a cause for the Civil War, but not the primary cause. Lincoln knew that the economy of the South depended upon slavery and so (before the Civil War) he had no intention of eliminating it. Lincoln had put it this way in his inaugural address only one month earlier:

“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it now exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

Even after the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, Lincoln continued to insist that the Civil War was not about the issue of slavery:

“My paramount objective is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it.”

So what was the Civil War all about? There were many factors at play. Northern industrialists had used protective tariffs to prevent their southern states from buying cheaper European goods. Europe retaliated by stopping cotton imports from the South. The Southern states were in a financial bind. They were forced to pay more for most of the necessities of life while their income from cotton exports plummeted. The South grew ncreasingly angry.

But there were other factors at work. … The central bankers now saw an pportunity to use the North/South divisions to split the rich new nation – to divide and conquer by war. Was this just some sort of wild conspiracy theory? Well, let’s look at what a well placed observer of the scene had to say at time.

This was Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of Germany, the man who united the German states in 1871. A few years later, in 1876, he is quoted as saying:

“It is not to be doubted, I know of absolute certainty,” Bismarck declared, “that the division of the United States into two federations of equal power was decided long before the Civil War by the high financial powers of Europe. These bankers were afraid that the United States, if they remained as one block and were to develop as one nation, would attain economic and financial independence, which would upset the capitalist domination of Europe over the world.”

Within months after the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, the central bankers loaned Napoleon III of France (the nephew of the Waterloo Napoleon) 210 million francs to seize Mexico and station troops along the southern border of the U.S., taking advantage of the Civil War to violate the Monroe Doctrine and return Mexico to colonial rule.

No matter what the outcome of the Civil War, it was hoped that a war-weakened America, heavily indebted to the Money Changers, would open up Central and South America once again to European colonization and domination.

At the same time, Great Britain moved 11,000 troops into Canada and positioned them along America’s northern border. The British fleet went on war alert should their quick intervention be called for.