HAMILTON’S ECONOMIC IDEAS WERE GOOD

HAMILTON’S ECONOMIC IDEAS WERE GOOD

1. HAMILTON BELIEVED IN EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY, NOT FORCED EQUITY

David Upham, Department of Politics, University of Dallas, "The Primacy of Property Rights and the American Founding," Independent Institute Website, 1997, p. np, http://www.independent.org/tii/students/GarveyEssay97Upham.html, accessed May 1, 2002.
The Founders’ attachment to economic freedom was in no way, in their understanding, opposed to the principle of equality. As Lincoln repeatedly emphasized, the equality proclaimed in the Declaration is not an equality in all respects. The "authors of that notable instrument...did not mean to say all were equal in...intellect, moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctiveness, in what respects they did considered all men created equal—equal in ‘certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ This they said and this meant." Moreover, not only did the Founders’ understanding of equality not include all kinds of equality (such as the equality of economic condition championed by the Progressives), their conception of human equality necessarily excluded equality of condition. They believed that everyone had an equal right to exercise his individual abilities to acquire property, abilities which were by nature unequal, and that the equal right to employ unequal talents would necessarily lead to economic inequality. As Alexander Hamilton stated in the constitutional convention: "It is certainly true that nothing like an equality of property existed: that an inequality would exist as long as liberty existed, and that it would unavoidably result from that very liberty itself."
2. HAMILTON’S SUPPORT OF THE WEALTHY DIDN’T INTEND TO CREATE ARISTOCRACY
Lisa Marie de Carolis, Department of Alfa-informatica, University of Groningen, A Biography of Alexander Hamilton, 1997, http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/B/hamilton/hamil00.htm, accessed May 1,2002.
This was Hamilton's most controversial position about which he was quite frank, and which would incite fierce protest on the part of those who feared that Hamilton aimed to create an aristocracy. Hamilton was, as usual, simply drawing on realities that he felt, although not necessarily equitable, would benefit the nation as a whole in the long run. Securing the support of the wealthy was only a first step in his complete economic picture. The accumulation of wealth was not Hamilton's goal; he wanted to encourage the use of private wealth for beneficial enterprises. Hamilton envisioned a strong economy in which everyone could participate and profit. Landed wealth, represented by the Virginia opposition, was limiting and limited; whereas paper wealth was fluid, and opened up wider vistas in international trade and domestic industrialization. Industry would diversify labor, thus creating more jobs and income sources for a burgeoning population. Hamilton's vision was dynamic and made use of all the possibilities of a young nation with unlimited resources and boundless potential.

3. HAMILTON’S NATIONAL BANK WAS AN ENGINE OF PROSPERITY

HAMILTON WAS OPPOSED TO DEMOCRACY

1. HAMILTON BELIEVED DEMOCRACY WAS A GREAT BEAST, COMMON PEOPLE A MENACE

Noam Chomsky, Professor of Linguistics at the Massachussets Institute of Technology, Mellon Lecture, Loyola University, Chicago, October 19, 1994, p. np, http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/talks/9410-education.html, accessed April 29, 2002.

Eighty years earlier Alexander Hamilton had put it clearly. He said there was the idea that your people are a great beast and that the real disease is democracy. That's Hamilton. These ideas have become ever more entrenched in educated circles, as Jefferson's fears and Bakunin's predictions were increasingly realised. The basic attitudes coming into this century were expressed very clearly by Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, attitudes that led to Wilson's Red Scare, as it was called, which destroyed labour and independent thought for a decade. Lansing warned of the danger of allowing the "ignorant and incapable mass of humanity" to become "dominant in the earth," or even influential, as he believed the Bolsheviks intended. That's the hysterical and utterly erroneous reaction that's pretty standard among people who feel that their power is threatened.

2. HAMILTON SOUGHT TO PRESERVE THE POWER OF THE RICH

Noam Chomsky, Professor of Linguistics at MIT, Z MAGAZINE, January 1995, p. 13.

Restating the Doctrine without equivocation, the masters have long sought to contain popular struggles to expand the range of meaningful democracy and human rights, but now perceive that they can do better. They feel, perhaps rightly, that they can dismantle the social contract that has been in some measure achieved, rolling back the threat posed by the "great beast" that keeps trying "to plunder the rich" (Alexander Hamilton and John Foster Dulles, speaking for a host of others). The architects of policy can move on to establish a utopia of the masters based on the values of greed and power, in which privilege is enhanced by state power and the general population lack rights apart from what they can salvage on a (highly flexible) labor market.
3. HAMILTON THOUGHT THE “WELL BORN” SHOULD RUN THE COUNTRY
Charles Beard, historian, FRAMING THE CONSTITUTION, 1912, p. 31.
Indeed, every page of the laconic record of the proceedings of the convention, preserved to posterity by Mr. Madison, shows conclusively that the members of that assembly were not seeking to realize any fine notions about democracy and equality, but were striving with all the resources of political wisdom at their command to set up a system of government that would be stable and efficient, safeguarded on the one hand against the possibilities of despotism and on the other against the onslaught of majorities. In the mind of Mr. Gerry, the evils they had experienced flowed "from the excess of democracy," and he confessed that while he was still republican, he "had been taught by experience the danger of the levelling spirit." Mr. Randolph, in offering to the consideration of the convention his plan of government, observed "that the general object was to provide a cure for the evils under which the United States labored; that, in tracing these evils to their origin, every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy; that some check therefore was to be sought for against this tendency of our governments; and that a good Senate seemed most likely to answer the purpose." Mr. Hamilton, in advocating a life term for Senators, urged that "all communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born and the other the mass of the people who seldom judge or determine right."
4. HAMILTON FEARED DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM
Noam Chomsky, Professor of Linguistics at the Massachussets Institute of Technology, Z MAGAZINE, January 1995, p. 13.
It therefore became necessary to renew with much greater intensity the constant campaign to tame and cage that "great beast," as Alexander Hamilton termed the "people" with horror and indignation as he was laying the foundations for state-guided industrial democracy. The beast may not yet be tamed, but it is being caged; sometimes quite literally, sometimes in chains of dogma and deceit, an important victory. We may recall, in passing, that fear of democracy and freedom has always been one of the factors motivating the terror and sometimes outright aggression undertaken to eliminate "rotten apples" that might "spoil the barrel" and "viruses" that might "infect others," in the terminology favored by leading planners -- the main concern, of course, being independence, whatever cast it takes.

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