What Hamilton Has Wrought by Thomas DiLorenzo

What Hamilton Has Wrought by Thomas DiLorenzo:

"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."