Eric Schliesser — On Presidents

On Alexander Hamilton's argument for dictatorship in a republic.

Digressions&Impressions
On Presidents
Eric Schliesser | Professor of Political Science, University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences

Bill Mitchell — Donald Trump’s tariff hikes are not good policy

I am generally not in favour of trade protection. I grew up in a country that had very extensive protection (tariffs, import quotas) on manufacturing goods, which was justified on a number of grounds – capacity to shift to defense industries; stable employment; and more abstractly, an expression of becoming a ‘modern’ nation, leaving our agrarian roots behind. The initial move to impose high tariffs was that a young industry would take time to develop – the so-called infant industry argument, which goes back to the 1790 Report on Manufactures written by American economist Alexander Hamilton. The problem is that the infant never really grew up and the tariffs just became a cosy rent-sharing margin for unions and multinational corporations. Meanwhile consumers paid excessive prices for deficient-quality motor vehicles (among other products). It is clear that as trade opens up there are workers and regions that lose – and lose badly. The answer is not try to reinvent the past through protection. Rather, it is to use the government’s fiscal capacity to create new opportunities in these regions to ensure that workers disadvantaged by import competition can transit into new jobs with stable incomes. That option is often overlooked because modern governments have become obsessed with austerity. And, as I argue below, that obsession will in the context of Donald Trump’s tariff hikes, work against the European nations that are running ridiculously large current account surpluses....

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Donald Trump’s tariff hikes are not good policy
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Andrew Spannaus — Roots of Trump’s ‘Economic Nationalism’ in the American System of Economics

Trump spoke of the need for a new economic model, and then recalled how protectionism is far from a bad word in US history; rather, it was seen as a means to promote manufacturing and build industry.

Trump said, “Like Henry Clay, we want to put our own people to work. […] “Clay was a fierce advocate for American manufacturing. He said that free trade would throw wide open our ports to foreign production without duties while theirs remained closed to us […] Clay said that trade must be fair, equal and reciprocal.”

Trump then went on to use the term “American System”, associated with the current of economic nationalism promoted by figures such as Alexander Hamilton, Clay and Henry Carey, champions of investment in industry and infrastructure, and protection against the free market claims of European empires, which sought to undermine American economic independence in order to defend their own pre-eminence.

“In explaining his American System, Clay argued that the sole object of the tariff is to tax the produce of foreign industry with a view of promoting American industry,” Trump said. “For too long our government has abandoned the American System.”...

Consortium News
Roots of Trump’s ‘Economic Nationalism’
Andrew Spannaus

J. Bradford DeLong — When Is Responsible Democratic Governance Possible? The Classical View: Never

Democracy Must Be Irresponsible: So Responsible Governance Must Be Undemocratic

This is why America was founded as a democratic republic rather than a democracy. The obvious question is why elected officials will not be approximately equal to the level of collective consciousness of voters and reflect voters' mindset. Oh right, the wealthy and successful will dominate the candidate selection process. But what if the selection process is conducted through primaries. Could not representatives of "the rabble" be selected since the rabble comprise the majority of the population?

Some interesting quotes of Alexander Hamilton.

Grasping Reality with Both Hands
When Is Responsible Democratic Governance Possible? The Classical View: Never
J. Bradford DeLong

Brad DeLong — A Note on the Jeffersonian Road Not Taken in American Economic History

Why Hamilton is important.

If Jefferson's view had prevailed, the US would likely have become a backwater.

Grasping Reality
A Note on the Jeffersonian Road Not Taken in American Economic History
Brad DeLong | Professor of Economics, UCAL Berkeley

Larry White — Alexander Hamilton, Banking Mercantilist

Hamilton modeled the Bank of the United States after the Bank of England. But in truth, the monopoly privileges of the BOE and other national banks of Europe were badges of mercantilism, and drags on financial and economic activity by comparison with free competition in banking services. A more wholesome, solid, and beneficial credit system could be observed in Scotland at the time, with free entry into nationwide branch banking. Hamilton’s “masterpiece” was oblivious to the benefits of competition in banking, much less the separation of banking and state. In his banking policy views, as in his tariff policy views, Hamilton was a retrograde mercantilist.

Hamilton was absolutely a mercantilist. He recognized that the US was in competition with mercantilist England and that the nascent republic was in no position to experiment. Hamilton's plan was to emulate success.

Although Hamilton’s Report on the Bank alludes to Smith’s understanding of how banking promotes the wealth of a nation, Hamilton either didn’t understand Smith’s policy message — the more banks competing the better — or rejected it as not helpful to his own mission of empowering the federal government, for which his chosen means was to forge an alliance between the government and a new privileged financial elite.

Good historical article, if this is your thing.

Alt-M
Alexander Hamilton, Banking Mercantilist

Larry White

Tony Wikrent — “If You Are Not Building a Nation, Then What the Fuck Are You Doing?”

May good points but I think that Tony is confused about the role of political and economic geography, geopolitics, and geostrategy. While the points he makes about development are well taken, they are largely orthogonal to the points that Alfred McCoy make about position relative to Halford Mackinder, and he might have included Nicholas Spyckman, too. Now, development is coming together with geographical position in Eurasia. This is likely to have much greater impact on much greater land space than the US has had owing to the relatively isolated position of the US geographically, which required amassing sea power like England previously.

The point is that if one doesn't understand how the players view the game as a set of rules on a particularly configured board, then one is not going to understand the moves that they are making and liable to make based on objectives and tradeoffs. It's therefore essential to understand the "grand chessboard," whatever one thinks of it. It is a high stakes game that the players take very seriously.

Naked Capitalism
“If You Are Not Building a Nation, Then What the Fuck Are You Doing?”
Yves Smith
Guest post by Tony Wikrent

Tony Wikrent — HAWB 1801 - Alexander Hamilton and Albert Gallatin - How America Was Built

Economics history of the US.

Real Economics
HAWB 1801 - Alexander Hamilton and Albert Gallatin - How America Was Built

Tony Wikrent

United States Remains a British Colony, Looted Surreptitiously, Through Banking Practices?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

British bankers as a monkey still on our back?  Or worse?

The United States Remains a British Colony?

And Alexander Hamilton & Aaron Burr should have both gone down with Benedict Arnold?

And even George Washington was confused on this point!

Parts of this essay are very confused (see the section on our "National Debt" - not to mention Royal Opium fields), but the historical anecdotes, including comments by Bismarck, are fascinatingly revealing.

All military plans are meaningless (& any "local" plan whatsoever), without perception of FULL context?

I wonder if even Smedley Butler fully caught on. Certainly your average PhD hasn't (since I've talked to quite a few of my colleagues here, around the NIH, FDA, USDA etc). :(


So much sturm & drang, and all of it merely over misguided attempts by social parasites to keep aggregate populations constrained. This is so pathetic that it's painful to observe.

Bankers. Never have so few, slowed evolution by so much, for so long. Who's work are they doing?

And WHY?

"While boasting of our noble deeds we're careful to conceal the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we have nationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined, is not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery." - Horace Greeley (1860s - note the timing)

I'm reminded once again of Plato's quote, from circa 380BC:

"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors." - Plato(~350BC)

That's no way to drive our own social evolution, nor to co-chaperone evolution of anyone or anything else.

And those voices in your head, from the monkey on your back? Turns out they've been teaching "economics" ... all along!

Who knew that "balanced fiat" were code words for "gimme banana!" That would actually explain a lot.

Like Abe Lincoln (& Horace Greeley) advised, we should have none of this BS. We've got countless bigger & better options to explore, & more of them every single day. The era of the banker parasites has come to an end, though it may not occur by any path that current agitators could foresee.

Now that GoogleWallet is taking off even more (thanks to Apple! :) ).  Maybe the entire merchant world will turn on banks, and break their monopoly.

This indirect route might change things faster than all the people trying to use sledgehammers on a mountain.

No wonder so many banks & billionaires are investing in Apple.

Apple vs Google may become a proxy fight between banksters/aristocracy and the rest of the F500+SMEs+consumers combined.

Here are some further hints that Apple (& their billionaire investors) could be buying into, counting on, or at least clueless about class warfare.

"Google Wallet never got off the ground because Android is for poor people who lack the discretionary income to justify stores buying the NFC readers. This is still true with Softcard, which won't get off the ground for the very same reason. Now, Samsung has its own wallet for its wealthy customers that it'll favor over Google Wallet, but it's a moot point as Samsung's wealthy Galaxy customers are switching to iPhones because it's increasing clear now that Apple is pulling away from Samsung on all fronts such as Apple Pay uses tokenization for greater security but Samsung's new wallet doesn't. Apple increasingly owns the top 20% consumer segment who have the greatest spending power and want the highest mobile wallet security, so both Google and Samsung are left with their less-securewallets for their shared low-income customer base."
http://seekingalpha.com/article/2944036-why-google-is-winning-the-wallet-wars?ifp=0&v=1424954700

Yes, this is a complete mess, and FUBAR. However if anyone has practice at succeeding with accelerating chaos, it's Americans. We can do this, if we try.

What's that say re UK commoners? Not to mention all people in the "Commonwealth".

Oh, those clever British Bankster bastards. Only they could devise a scheme re-labeling capitulation to economic slavery as helping "Common Wealth."

The bigger the lie, the easier it is to believe?

Christian Parenti — Reading Hamilton From the Left

About "Hamilton’s 'American School of economics and its successor in the 'American System' of Henry Clay of Kentucky, with its package of policy ideas drawn from The Report: a high tariff, a national bank, public funding of infrastructure or 'internal improvements.'”

Jacobin
Reading Hamilton From the Left
Christian Parenti

Rivera Sun — Oligarchy: As American as Poisoned Apple Pie

What you missed in your mandatory class in American History in high school.

...after the war, the revolutionary notion of democracy produced a counter-revolution. Oligarchs of that era found it difficult to conduct business among the 13 sovereign states, each of which was developing its own laws regulating commerce, taxes and tariffs. The first constitution of the United States (the Articles of Confederation) endured for 10 years, starting in 1778, before the oligarchs could find a way around it. Even then, they had to resort to extraordinary means.

In February 1787, George Washington (the richest man in the United States) proposed a convention in May in Philadelphia for the alleged purposes of revising the Articles of Confederation. Upon arrival, however, delegates to the Philadelphia Convention were dismayed to discover that Washington, Madison, Hamilton and others wanted to throw out the old Articles of Confederation. In their place, Hamilton proposed a new, second Constitution of the United States, which included a powerful federal government to rule over the state governments, a president for life, a senate appointed for life, an electoral college that elects the president and an appointed for life Supreme Court with authority over the state courts. 

"Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy," Alexander Hamilton is quoted as saying according to the Notes of the Secret Debates of the Federal Convention of 1787 taken by Robert Yates.

Many of the delegates left in protest. Of the 62 delegates appointed, only 39 signed the new Constitution. The Philadelphia Convention, widely heralded today as the birthplace of democracy, was nothing short of an oligarchic coup. Terms for elected officials were a minor concession to the proponents of democracy. The Bill of Rights was tacked on at the insistence of outraged citizens during the process of ratification, but it narrowed the list of protected rights to 10 out of the dozens that were initially proposed.

Today, tourists can visit the sunny, open rooms of Liberty Hall, but in 1787, the Convention took place under strict secrecy. The doors were closed; the windows blacked out and security guards ringed the building. In Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, the rules stated, "That nothing spoken in the House be printed or otherwise published or communicated." James Madison, one of the main recorders, refused to publish his notes until all of the framers were buried in the grave....

Truthout
Oligarchy: As American as Poisoned Apple Pie
Rivera Sun, Truthout | Op-Ed

"All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and the well-born; the other the mass of the people ... turbulent and changing, they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the Government ... Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy."

Alexander Hamilton
speech to the Constitutional Convention concerning the United States Senate, 06/18/1787, quoted in the notes of Judge Yates

Ira Chernu — If Only the Tea Party Crowd Knew Where Their Ideas Came from

It all began when I was re-reading Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution (trying to escape from obsessively tracking the DC rollercoaster.) As Wood observes, the Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians divided over basically the same issue that plagues us now: How much of a role should government play in people's lives? (Though the clash back then was so fierce, and split American society so sharply, that it makes today's politics look rather mild by comparison.

But Wood takes us deeper into the substance of the issue. Jeffersonians were willing to limit government only because they assumed that there was "a principle of benevolence ... a moral instinct, a sense of sympathy, in each human being." They were founding an American nation upon the European Enlightenment's belief that "there was 'a natural principle of attraction in man towards man' [as Hume put it], and that these natural affinities were by themselves capable of holding the society together."

This was exactly the point that frightened Alexander Hamilton most. He summed up his opponents' view quite accurately: "As human nature shall refine and ameliorate by the operation of a more enlightened plan," based on common moral sense and the spread of affection and benevolence, government eventually "will become useless, and Society will subsist and flourish free from its shackles." Then Hamilton, the greatest conservative of his day, dismissed this vision of shrinking government as "a wild and fatal scheme."

The Republicans who now control the House obviously have a very different view of what it means to be a true conservative. But that doesn't mean they have become Jeffersonians. Not by any means. In many ways they would be closer to Hamilton, who scorned Jefferson's trust in human nature.

AlterNet
If Only the Tea Party Crowd Knew Where Their Ideas Came from
Ira Chernu

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang: Reviewed by Thom Hartmann

Ha-Joon Chang debunks the neoliberal myth of free trade spread by Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek. It turns out to be neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism. Alexander Hamilton was wise enough to adopt protectionism for US infant industries to counter the rich and powerful countries of Europe and grow the US economy. In the present case, so-called free trade helps US multinational firms but hemorrhages jobs, further undercutting labor bargaining power and pruning the middle class.

Buzz Flash
Ha-Joon Chang's 'Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism'
Reviewed by Thom Hartmann

Alexander Hamilton on democracy

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and, however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give, therefore, to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and, as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government. Can a democratic Assembly, who annually revolve in the mass of the people, be supposed steadily to pursue the public good? Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of a democracy. Their turbulent and uncontrolling disposition requires checks.

Alexander Hamilton
Speeches in the Federal Convention, p. 401

You know, because some people are better than others.