Alexander Hamilton’s Crony Big Government Views Have Prevailed for the Past 200 Years

Murray Sabrin has sent the following Letter to the Editor of the North Jersey Record in response to an article that appeared in the paper.

Regarding “We must care for each other” (Your Views, May 8):

The letter writer’s paean about Alexander Hamilton ignores how one of the most influential Founders laid the foundation for America’s crony capitalist economy.

As economist and historian Thomas DiLorenzo, author of Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution—And What It Means for America Today, recently wrote,  “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.”

In addition, writes DiLorenzo, “Hamilton was a protectionist…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 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.”

And as far as the national debt is concerned, “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.”

In short, Hamilton’s big government views have prevailed for the past 200 years.  The result, a central bank that causes the boom-bust cycle and a federal government that has $210 trillion of unfunded liabilities—the real debt burden of the American people.